A multiplicity of posts
Jul. 9th, 2006 09:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirDeWolfe Apts., on the Feast of Ste. Veronica Giuliani
I've been rather silent on LJ lately, due to an inability to sit down long enough to write anything of substance, other than the usual epic emails to Daera and Nan. Here's what I've been meaning to post for the past week:
1. Swan Lake: I went home last weekend, ostensibly for the Fourth of July, but more importantly to go see Swan Lake with my mother at Lincoln Center. I had thought (erroneously) that we were going to see an NYCB performance but instead it was an ABT performance. The last time I saw the ABT was back in 2003, when I went to see Coppelìa, where a company dancer actually fell on stage midway through the performance. The utter lack of rehearsal, the ridiculous choreography, and the technical weaknesses of the performers completely ruined the performance for me. So I was not happy to hear that the Swan Lake performance I had anticipated was not by the NYCB as I had hoped but by the ABT, which I hadn't planned on ever seeing again.
My mother told me that I shouldn't judge a company on the basis of one performance and that surely, surely they would do justice to Swan Lake. Oh, how wrong we were.
I will say that no one fell on stage--at least, not by any mistake on the part of the performers. (There was a supposedly humorous moment during the peasants' dance at the prince's birthday party where a girl got passed down a line of ballerinos but got dropped by the last one. It didn't look at all amusing to me though.) The classic choreography by Petipa and Ivanov had been "adapted" by some contemporary choreographer at the ABT, and oh, words cannot express my loathing for him, whoever he is. How could someone make such ruins out of a Tchaikovsky ballet? That takes more than incompetence; it's almost downright sabotage. The choreography was completely out of sync with the music. At the very minimum, the energy of the dance ought to increase with the music, but we were left with all this musical tension in the air while the dancers were lightly floating about the stage with no passion at all. I'm still flabbergasted by how insipid the dancing was. I mean, Swan Lake, tragic love story! It should move me to tears not leave me surreptitiously yawning in my seat. Where was the chemistry between the two leads? Where was the poignancy, the emotion? It also didn't help that the technical level of the ballet was low enough that I could identify the majority of the steps (and I only learned for about nine years). The sets and costumes were lavish and historically accurate down to the last detail, but what thrill could come from that when the dancing was so disappointing?
I think the problem is in the very name of the company: American Ballet Theatre. The ABT seeks to put on theatrical performances, not ballet, and the two are very different. They may have followed every basic directorial rule we were taught in high school communication/theater courses, but I don't come to a ballet to see a play or even a musical. I come to see dance. Having company dancers move about in the background and mime conversations and little storylines of their own during a major solo may help create the illusion of a realistic theatrical scene, but it only looks incoherent and disorganized in a ballet. The audience's eye is supposed to be drawn to the soloist in a ballet; that is the charisma of a truly magnificent prima ballerina. At one point during the birthday feast, they brought in a maypole, which looked utterly ridiculous on stage. I can't imagine what possessed the choreographer or producer to come up with that idea. Also, the final double suicide scene had the cheesiest execution I've ever seen, with the lead dancers hurling themselves off a bridge, followed by a sunrise in the backdrop to the accompaniment of a most injudicious crescendo from the orchestra. (The orchestra was horrible too; no subtlety in dynamics whatsoever.) The prince was a mediocre dancer--none of the thrills that one feels at watching a ballerino execute difficult leaps--and while Odette/Odile was possibly the only world-class dancer in the company, she was too hampered by the choreography to dance her best. And there was something missing nonetheless, a certain expressivity. I still can't believe that I could watch Odile's thirty-eight pirouettes and remain completely unmoved.
The only moments where the ballet shone was when the original Petipa and Ivanov choreography was retained, and I could recognize the same ballet that I grew up watching on videotapes as a child. Maybe I'm a conservative, but I really can't see how anyone could watch old taped performances by the Bolshoi and still be able to attend performances by the ABT without feeling disappointed. Although the woman sitting next to me clearly didn't think so because she gave them a standing ovation. (She was definitely a strange old woman, who kept tapping at the people in front of us to lean back in their seats.) My mother, however, agreed with me that from now on we'll save our money for the New York City Ballet...which may mean that we'll never see a ballet in New York again considering how expensive NYCB tickets are. (ABT is significantly cheaper.)
2. The King and the Clown: Rewatched the movie, this time on video, with my parents, who were less than enamored. ::sighs:: I liked it, however, and I was glad to have a chance to watch it again because the first time I saw it, I was trying to instantaneously translate the second half of the movie to Nan since the subtitle file was refusing to download.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
baka_neko has a good review here, so I'll keep my thoughts brief. Oddly enough, I don't think Lee Junki (who plays Gong-gil) is the most noticeable actor in this film; I think the actor who played Jang-saeng was much better. Although I suppose he didn't get as much attention being not as pretty and not as much of a new face to the screen. The dialogue in this film was really just excellent, from start to finish. That scene where one of the conspirators asks the eunuch, "You have served three kings; will you not serve a fourth with us?" and the eunuch replies, "The heavens choose the king, not I." Oh, and the final scene, where Gong-gil asks, "If you are reborn, who would you want to be? A king?" Jang-saeng replies, "Not a bit! I'll be a clown. And you? If you are reborn, who would you want to be?" Gong-gil shouts back, tears running down his cheeks, "It goes without saying, a clown!"
I still tear up at that scene. ;_;
3. Fourth of July: We walked down to MIT and went to watch the fireworks. I really do think that the Boston fireworks are the best I've ever seen. New York might win when it comes to number but not when it comes to creativity or aesthetics. Some photos uploaded to facebook.com here. Yes, that is me in the pale orange shirt, sitting next toschwimmerin. My timing with the camera got better and better as the show went on but I ran out of batteries just as I was starting to get the hang of it. Ah well.
4. Paper-writing: In lab, we've been preparing a paper for submission, and so I spent last Friday sitting in a discussion/editing session for about five straight hours, since I'm to be one of the authors. A notable conversation:
Grad student: But is it "readily transferable" or just "transferable"?
Principal investigator (P.I. for short): I should say it's readily transferable. What do you think?
Post-doc: I don't know...what's wrong with "readily"?
Grad student: It's only "readily" transferable if [long explanation that I don't remember accurately but I think had to do with the ease of identification of indel polymorphisms in other species]
P.I., turning to me: What about you?
Me: Uh...well, it's only an adverb.
Grad student: Oh, clearly you've never written a paper with [big name researcher who is his advisor]. If she was here, we would have spent a day on this word.
Me: ......
5. Overheard in Boston Common: Yesterday,schwimmerin and I went to Boston Common for the watermelon festival. I saw a group of Mennonites for the first time and couldn't believe my eyes. (Apparently, Mennonites are like the Amish except they leave their towns to go evangelize. I thought they were a Puritan reenaction group at first.) We also picked up free samples and watermelon slices, bought a quarter-pound of fudge, and watched a street acrobatics performance, where the following priceless line was heard.
Acrobat: I'm saving up money to go back home to England. So if you don't give us any donations, I'll stay here and marry one of your daughters! Or your sons! You voted for it after all.
He was actually quite hilarious although some of his jokes had a bit too much innuendo and were probably inappropriate for the children in the audience. I think he must have had training in a circus somewhere because the style was not at all like the usual hip-hop acrobatics one normally sees on city streets.
6. Pirates of the Caribbean: We went to see Pirates of the Caribbean after the watermelon festival. I liked it a lot but I didn't quite enjoy it as wholeheartedly as I did the first movie. I thinksomniesperus probably sums it up best here. Poor Orlando Bloom still can't act, and Keira Knightley isn't as overwhelmingly awesome as she usually is, crossdressing as cabin boy or no, but Johnny Depp is as wonderful as ever, and let's face it, that's all you really need from this movie.
Spent most of yesterday reading![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
bb_shousetsu instead of studying for the GRE. Must remedy that with extra studying today. Not to mention the long, nonobligatory backlog of reviews I've been intending to write for the past few months. >_>
Yours &c.
Post-script: Oh, I nearly forgot to mention! I recently reread Five Little Peppers Midway, Five Little Peppers Abroad and Five Little Peppers Grown Up, and spent nearly the whole time imagining up Jasper/Polly scenes. I mean, we know the two are meant for each other, and while I'm all for subtext and leaving things to the reader's imagination, I would like to see something of the progression in their relationship instead of hearing about Polly's other admirers. ;_; This frustration may result in really bad Five Little Peppers fanfic.
Anyway, I thought it would be nice to compile a reading mix for children's books featuring those models of good behavior that would drive most people up the wall in real life. What I have so far:
- Pollyanna Whittier, from Pollyanna, by Ellen Porter
- Polly and Phronsie Pepper, from Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, by Margaret Sidney
- Sara Crewe, from A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Anne Shirley, from Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery
- Elnora Comstock, from A Girl of the Limberlost, by Gene Stratton-Porter
- Rebecca Randall, from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, by Kate Douglas Wiggin
- The March sisters, from Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
Any further suggestions?
Yours &c.
I've been rather silent on LJ lately, due to an inability to sit down long enough to write anything of substance, other than the usual epic emails to Daera and Nan. Here's what I've been meaning to post for the past week:
1. Swan Lake: I went home last weekend, ostensibly for the Fourth of July, but more importantly to go see Swan Lake with my mother at Lincoln Center. I had thought (erroneously) that we were going to see an NYCB performance but instead it was an ABT performance. The last time I saw the ABT was back in 2003, when I went to see Coppelìa, where a company dancer actually fell on stage midway through the performance. The utter lack of rehearsal, the ridiculous choreography, and the technical weaknesses of the performers completely ruined the performance for me. So I was not happy to hear that the Swan Lake performance I had anticipated was not by the NYCB as I had hoped but by the ABT, which I hadn't planned on ever seeing again.
My mother told me that I shouldn't judge a company on the basis of one performance and that surely, surely they would do justice to Swan Lake. Oh, how wrong we were.
I will say that no one fell on stage--at least, not by any mistake on the part of the performers. (There was a supposedly humorous moment during the peasants' dance at the prince's birthday party where a girl got passed down a line of ballerinos but got dropped by the last one. It didn't look at all amusing to me though.) The classic choreography by Petipa and Ivanov had been "adapted" by some contemporary choreographer at the ABT, and oh, words cannot express my loathing for him, whoever he is. How could someone make such ruins out of a Tchaikovsky ballet? That takes more than incompetence; it's almost downright sabotage. The choreography was completely out of sync with the music. At the very minimum, the energy of the dance ought to increase with the music, but we were left with all this musical tension in the air while the dancers were lightly floating about the stage with no passion at all. I'm still flabbergasted by how insipid the dancing was. I mean, Swan Lake, tragic love story! It should move me to tears not leave me surreptitiously yawning in my seat. Where was the chemistry between the two leads? Where was the poignancy, the emotion? It also didn't help that the technical level of the ballet was low enough that I could identify the majority of the steps (and I only learned for about nine years). The sets and costumes were lavish and historically accurate down to the last detail, but what thrill could come from that when the dancing was so disappointing?
I think the problem is in the very name of the company: American Ballet Theatre. The ABT seeks to put on theatrical performances, not ballet, and the two are very different. They may have followed every basic directorial rule we were taught in high school communication/theater courses, but I don't come to a ballet to see a play or even a musical. I come to see dance. Having company dancers move about in the background and mime conversations and little storylines of their own during a major solo may help create the illusion of a realistic theatrical scene, but it only looks incoherent and disorganized in a ballet. The audience's eye is supposed to be drawn to the soloist in a ballet; that is the charisma of a truly magnificent prima ballerina. At one point during the birthday feast, they brought in a maypole, which looked utterly ridiculous on stage. I can't imagine what possessed the choreographer or producer to come up with that idea. Also, the final double suicide scene had the cheesiest execution I've ever seen, with the lead dancers hurling themselves off a bridge, followed by a sunrise in the backdrop to the accompaniment of a most injudicious crescendo from the orchestra. (The orchestra was horrible too; no subtlety in dynamics whatsoever.) The prince was a mediocre dancer--none of the thrills that one feels at watching a ballerino execute difficult leaps--and while Odette/Odile was possibly the only world-class dancer in the company, she was too hampered by the choreography to dance her best. And there was something missing nonetheless, a certain expressivity. I still can't believe that I could watch Odile's thirty-eight pirouettes and remain completely unmoved.
The only moments where the ballet shone was when the original Petipa and Ivanov choreography was retained, and I could recognize the same ballet that I grew up watching on videotapes as a child. Maybe I'm a conservative, but I really can't see how anyone could watch old taped performances by the Bolshoi and still be able to attend performances by the ABT without feeling disappointed. Although the woman sitting next to me clearly didn't think so because she gave them a standing ovation. (She was definitely a strange old woman, who kept tapping at the people in front of us to lean back in their seats.) My mother, however, agreed with me that from now on we'll save our money for the New York City Ballet...which may mean that we'll never see a ballet in New York again considering how expensive NYCB tickets are. (ABT is significantly cheaper.)
2. The King and the Clown: Rewatched the movie, this time on video, with my parents, who were less than enamored. ::sighs:: I liked it, however, and I was glad to have a chance to watch it again because the first time I saw it, I was trying to instantaneously translate the second half of the movie to Nan since the subtitle file was refusing to download.
baka_neko has a good review here, so I'll keep my thoughts brief. Oddly enough, I don't think Lee Junki (who plays Gong-gil) is the most noticeable actor in this film; I think the actor who played Jang-saeng was much better. Although I suppose he didn't get as much attention being not as pretty and not as much of a new face to the screen. The dialogue in this film was really just excellent, from start to finish. That scene where one of the conspirators asks the eunuch, "You have served three kings; will you not serve a fourth with us?" and the eunuch replies, "The heavens choose the king, not I." Oh, and the final scene, where Gong-gil asks, "If you are reborn, who would you want to be? A king?" Jang-saeng replies, "Not a bit! I'll be a clown. And you? If you are reborn, who would you want to be?" Gong-gil shouts back, tears running down his cheeks, "It goes without saying, a clown!"I still tear up at that scene. ;_;
3. Fourth of July: We walked down to MIT and went to watch the fireworks. I really do think that the Boston fireworks are the best I've ever seen. New York might win when it comes to number but not when it comes to creativity or aesthetics. Some photos uploaded to facebook.com here. Yes, that is me in the pale orange shirt, sitting next to
schwimmerin. My timing with the camera got better and better as the show went on but I ran out of batteries just as I was starting to get the hang of it. Ah well.4. Paper-writing: In lab, we've been preparing a paper for submission, and so I spent last Friday sitting in a discussion/editing session for about five straight hours, since I'm to be one of the authors. A notable conversation:
Grad student: But is it "readily transferable" or just "transferable"?
Principal investigator (P.I. for short): I should say it's readily transferable. What do you think?
Post-doc: I don't know...what's wrong with "readily"?
Grad student: It's only "readily" transferable if [long explanation that I don't remember accurately but I think had to do with the ease of identification of indel polymorphisms in other species]
P.I., turning to me: What about you?
Me: Uh...well, it's only an adverb.
Grad student: Oh, clearly you've never written a paper with [big name researcher who is his advisor]. If she was here, we would have spent a day on this word.
Me: ......
5. Overheard in Boston Common: Yesterday,
schwimmerin and I went to Boston Common for the watermelon festival. I saw a group of Mennonites for the first time and couldn't believe my eyes. (Apparently, Mennonites are like the Amish except they leave their towns to go evangelize. I thought they were a Puritan reenaction group at first.) We also picked up free samples and watermelon slices, bought a quarter-pound of fudge, and watched a street acrobatics performance, where the following priceless line was heard.Acrobat: I'm saving up money to go back home to England. So if you don't give us any donations, I'll stay here and marry one of your daughters! Or your sons! You voted for it after all.
He was actually quite hilarious although some of his jokes had a bit too much innuendo and were probably inappropriate for the children in the audience. I think he must have had training in a circus somewhere because the style was not at all like the usual hip-hop acrobatics one normally sees on city streets.
6. Pirates of the Caribbean: We went to see Pirates of the Caribbean after the watermelon festival. I liked it a lot but I didn't quite enjoy it as wholeheartedly as I did the first movie. I think
somniesperus probably sums it up best here. Poor Orlando Bloom still can't act, and Keira Knightley isn't as overwhelmingly awesome as she usually is, crossdressing as cabin boy or no, but Johnny Depp is as wonderful as ever, and let's face it, that's all you really need from this movie.Spent most of yesterday reading
bb_shousetsu instead of studying for the GRE. Must remedy that with extra studying today. Not to mention the long, nonobligatory backlog of reviews I've been intending to write for the past few months. >_>Yours &c.
Post-script: Oh, I nearly forgot to mention! I recently reread Five Little Peppers Midway, Five Little Peppers Abroad and Five Little Peppers Grown Up, and spent nearly the whole time imagining up Jasper/Polly scenes. I mean, we know the two are meant for each other, and while I'm all for subtext and leaving things to the reader's imagination, I would like to see something of the progression in their relationship instead of hearing about Polly's other admirers. ;_; This frustration may result in really bad Five Little Peppers fanfic.
Anyway, I thought it would be nice to compile a reading mix for children's books featuring those models of good behavior that would drive most people up the wall in real life. What I have so far:
- Pollyanna Whittier, from Pollyanna, by Ellen Porter
- Polly and Phronsie Pepper, from Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, by Margaret Sidney
- Sara Crewe, from A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Anne Shirley, from Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery
- Elnora Comstock, from A Girl of the Limberlost, by Gene Stratton-Porter
- Rebecca Randall, from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, by Kate Douglas Wiggin
- The March sisters, from Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
Any further suggestions?
Yours &c.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-09 02:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-10 11:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-09 03:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-10 11:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-09 05:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-10 11:47 pm (UTC)I actually did wholeheartedly like all of the heroines in the list, but rereading the books now makes me realize that they could only exist in fiction. XD;;
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-09 07:40 pm (UTC)I wouldn't count Little Women -- only Beth was good all the time, the other characters were real people. And the story didn't always reward them for being virtuous. I don't know, maybe if you only counted the first half of the novel before *spoiler*?
Also, I'm laughing my head off at your paper story. The sentences in papers aren't really sentences, you know, they're descriptive phrases designed for the precise conveyance of information. Using the wrong adverb would be lying.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-10 11:56 pm (UTC)Little Women and Anne of Green Gables were both question marks for me...I do feel in some sense that while they are well-rounded characters and not perfect decorous heroines like the others, they do have the "too good to be true" quality to them. Hm, I guess I'll have to decide whether to keep the category narrow or expand it.
Re: paper-writing, in addition to the insistence on the accuracy of every single word (and I admit I was guilty of that myself: "You can't use 'combine' because you don't say what you're combining it with. Can we use 'exploits' instead?"), there's also the personal peeves of all the writers. We had an argument over "repeatability" and "genomically" today because different people found them distasteful to their ears.