To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Yesterday during my lesson, I actually managed to center a spin of more than two revolutions. (It was somewhere between three and five; it's hard to count revs while you're in one.) THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. Did I mention I finally found the spin rocker on my blades? (On any blades, for that matter; I never found it on my old ones.) I can feel the drag pick scraping when I spin, which is not ideal but is a hell of a lot better than I've ever managed before, because it means I'm just a millimeter forward of the right spot rather than half an inch behind it.

I just need that to show up for the test on Friday. I didn't get a chance to try and center one out of P's sight because my lesson was at the end of the session, but I'm certainly going to try tomorrow. (Skating reminds me of my struggles with math in K-12. Everything worked perfectly in class when the teacher was there, but the minute I tried to do stuff we'd just done that school day at home, everything went to hell. I grew up practically believing math teachers were magic and I could only really do math in their presence. My skating always improves when I'm in a lesson, even when P is not actually giving me corrections at that moment.)

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I watched Guardians of the Galaxy this weekend. I went into it completely blind, purely on the recommendation of a co-worker. Things I was not expecting:

1. The talking raccoon.
2. Lee Pace.
3. Sweet, innocent, adorable Lee Pace as the villain.
4. Lee Pace with his eyebrows covered up (sacrilege!).
5....except I guess on some level you could argue that the makeup department made his eyebrows take over his entire face? But they were still hidden by makeup! Why do you have a Lee Pace and immobilize his eyebrows??

I wasn't impressed with the movie. It felt like it had the structure of a children's movie, with half-hearted attempts at the trappings of an adult movie thrown in at random intervals. Pixar manages to do the "kids movie with some fun bits for the adults," but this was not like that at all. It was awkward and weird.

The tree was cool, though. I liked the tree.

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How much stock should we put in the ever-more-substantiated rumors of an X-Files remake/continuation with Duchovny and Anderson? Part of me is squeeing uncontrollably, while another part is remembering that the second movie was actually not that good, so I have mixed feelings.

Learned forward inside three turns today!

...Totally wiped out on one!

Thankfully, it was more of an embarrassing fall than a painful one, though I'll probably feel it tomorrow. I landed flat on my butt/back, so I have some padding there that took the brunt of the impact. Nevertheless, I managed to complete several in each direction.

My arms are a mess on the inside and outside turns, though less so on the clockwise ones. Between that and my distinctly poorer ability to "open" my left hip, I'm starting to wonder if skeletal structure is playing a part in this. My right hip is higher and sticks out more, and while it's not obvious to my eye in the mirror, I suspect that does something to my right shoulder that makes it correspondingly more "closed."

Or maybe I just need to practice more.

All I need to pass Gamma is the stupid hockey stop. Rar. I'm getting there, but it's slow.

My instructor and I were talking about ballroom dance (she's an ice dancer, so she's done a bit of ballroom) and I think we may wind up going to the Monday night old people's dance lesson/party someday soon. That would be fun! Pain-inducing the next morning when I have to get up early after getting home late, but, you know.

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After being a doofus and missing it when it was in the theaters (the first movie I actually wanted to see in 3D!), I finally watched The Great Gatsby last night. ( Spoilers )

Because sometimes you just need to write a missing scene for a 75-year-old movie almost no one still alive has seen, you know? (P.S. It's Myrna Loy and William Powell being cute and awesome, so you should watch it!)

This also fulfills the "being silly" square on my Cotton Candy Bingo card.

Title: On the Sunny Side of the Beach
Rating: Ever so G
Word count: 1650
Pairing: Charlie Lodge/Margit Agnew UST
Summary: "This morning by the sea, this afternoon in the woods..." Well, we saw the woods. I couldn't help but wonder about the sea.

( 'How can you really appreciate a summer day at the sea without a bathing suit?' / ' I believe I can manage.' )

My Fandom Stocking has been hung! I would love to get fic for anything on my list, or general notes and/or squee from y'all. If you're participating this year, point me at your stocking so I can leave you things!

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I've been cruising Tumblr lately. Here are some fruits of my voyages.

Photo of Ginger Rogers attempting to put makeup on a German Shepherd. Dog: "LOL no."

In which Ginger Rogers kicks ass, 1938 style. Seriously, that is hilarious. The movie it's from, Vivacious Lady, is pretty good too.

A sweet picture of Myrna Loy and William Powell I've never seen before. It looks like it might be a still from one of the later Thin Man movies.

Art Deco Batman posters. This one too. This one as well. (Batman's costume does translate really well into the Streamline Moderne style, doesn't it? I'm the last person in the world to notice this, aren't I? Ah, well. Can't say as I ever paid much attention to him or any other superhero...)

And for something completely different, Cookie Monster on Colbert. Part 2.

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( Unguessed answers to the ship description meme from the other day )

Someone took photos at some recent location filming for Fringe. Spoily! ( Spoily comment )

This one is not spoily at all, but it is very weird. Is it bad that I can't be absolutely certain whether it's just the biggest stage light in the world (apparently attached to a blimp? It seems tethered to the buildings rather than supported by them), a plot-related UFO, or an actual UFO.

On a different note, here's an undated picture from what appears to be a con: Anna Torv and Josh Jackson. I'm sure it's not been taken out of context at all...

A movie version of Midnight's Children is coming out next fall. I imagine it'll leave out a lot, as that is one packed book, but I bet it'll be gorgeous to look at. I learned about this from Salman Rushdie's Twitter, which just kind of blows my mind. Is he actually supposed to talk to mere mortals? I have no idea.

Apparently a Swede named Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. An author named Teju Cole wrote, "Tranströmer's words remind me of Arvo Pärt's music," to which I immediately said, "WHERE DO I FIND HIM?"

The answer is here, here, definitely here, and most certainly here. Cole is right about the Pärt comparison.

Aaaaaahhhhhh it's a cicada year aaaaaahhhhhh. There are brown bug husks all over, and it's only going to get worse for the next six weeks or so. (For the record, the last cicada year down here was 1998, when both the 13- and 17-year broods emerged. Musicians actually had to stop recording for a couple weeks at the height of it because the racket the bugs made penetrated the soundproofed studios. I trust this year will not be quite so bad.)

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I finished Middlemarch! I...find myself with little to say on it, actually. It was worth reading, but I think I liked Mill on the Floss better. My problem while I was reading it was that I was most interested in Dorothea's story, but the entire last third of the book is centered mostly on Bulstrode and to a lesser extent Lydgate. I read the introduction to my edition afterward, though, and Felecia Bonaparte wrote about their storyline in a way that convinced me of its importance to the work as a whole.

I do like the flashes of Modernist thought you get in Eliot's work, particularly in the way she starts to represent consciousnesses, as opposed to just characters. Rosamund especially got that treatment; she was like Mr. Dalloway's statement about everyone being solitary little icebergs on the sea in Woolf's Voyage Out taken to an almost ridiculous extreme, she was so trapped in her own little half-made-up world.

This novel highlighted a quality of Eliot's writing that I find both amusing and intriguing: she has this way of writing about provincial life that's simultaneously cutting and loving, sort of like the sentiment of "No one can insult my family but me." For biographical reasons, I get the impression that she really loathed large swathes of her past in the Midlands, such as the resistance to new ideas, gossipy tendencies, and hypocrisy, but at the same time, if I remember correctly she set everything she wrote in that area of the country, and even her most annoying, judgmental characters have their good sides.

I have to say that I thought the prelude portended much more death and destruction than actually occurred in the novel. I figured ( spoiler )

would never make it out alive after that cheerful little comparison to St. Theresa.

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In further media commentary, I recently watched two excellent films: The King's Speech and Copenhagen. Much has been written on the exemplary qualities of The King's Speech, so I'll just say that it's ALL TRUE and leave it at that.

Copenhagen (2002) is a BBC version of a play from...I think 1998? Nineties, anyway. It centers on a meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941, of which there is no definitive record besides of the fact that it occurred. (Most people think they discussed the possibility of using nuclear fission to create a weapon.) The film depicts several "drafts" of how the conversation might have gone, all tied together by the ghosts of the three characters commenting on the, uh, draftiness of them in an extradiegetic sort of way. Each version of the conversation touches on quantum physics, the morality of scientists working for war efforts, nuclear bombs, and all sorts of other interesting topics. It reminded me a good deal of Wit, because so much of the characters' human experience was filtered through an academic understanding of a particular field, and if there's one trope I love, it's that one. Not a lot happens, in a plot summary sense, in this movie, but it still fascinated me. Highly recommended.

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Fringe fans, I need fic recs! I usually don't read fic for this show; for whatever reason, it's just one of those shows (like BSG and Castle) that I don't feel the need for fanfic of. However, with S4 some four months away, I'm definitely feeling the need now, so if you've got favorites, lay them on me. I'm partial to Peter/Olivia, and after last week, I'd love some kidfic, but I'll happily read gen and other pairings that don't break them up. (Um, okay, I won't read Astrid/Walter. Not unless the writer can sell it amazingly well.)

In a document that I read at work today honoring a seed company, there was an awesome and I assume unintentional pun: "[Company name] was a growing enterprise on [street]..." Heh.

Speaking of plants, a couple more pictures: ( under the cut )

And finally, I won the Netflix lottery and got Black Swan the day after it came out. Unfortunately, ( the film stank. )

(I watched this yesterday afternoon, but even a day later, I still feel the need to excoriate that mess. So now you all get treated to my ranting. Sorry.)

I'm sure it's not news that marriage of convenience/otherwise faking couplehood is my bulletproof narrative kink. I also have a tremendous fondness for even the most formulaic romantic comedies out there. Sure, I wouldn't want to watch one every day, but a well-done series of predictable cliches, portrayed by charming people in charming settings...there's nothing quite like it for comfort entertainment.

So in theory, I should be all over The Proposal like a chicken on a junebug. Like white on rice. Like scum on a pond. Etc. Not only is it basically an updated Green Card, which I love, but it's Green Card set in small-town Alaska! It has Betty White! For the love of god, it's about a book editor and her assistant! You could not make a movie more tailored to my interests!

...And yet in fact it is an affront to formula rom-coms. It is offensively bad. Look, I know how these things work. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief and buy that two characters who don't much like each other can fall in love over the course of three days if they do it convincingly, but this was about as convincing as William Shatner's toupee. Instead of more than two scenes where Margaret and Andrew are shown beginning to tolerate each other, the writer decided the movie needed Sandra Bullock and Betty White, who was wearing some kind of faux Native Alaskan blanket, rapping and dancing in the woods. I wish I were making that up.

( More ranting. )

Awesome open source app that allows QuickTime to read basically any video format: Perian for Mac OS X. It essentially turns QT into VLC, then allows you to save whatever you need in QT format. Very useful for situations when, say, you have a bunch of AVIs and your video editing program only reads QT files. Not that I would know anything about this. *cough*

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I watched You've Got Mail a couple days ago--what can I say, sometimes nostalgia strikes hard, and I do own the DVD--and you know, it's really amazing how much has changed in the twelve years since it came out. The main plot is about a big chain bookstore pushing a little indie shop out of business, and now the big chains are closing stores right and left while they struggle to keep their heads above water thanks to Amazon et al. Not to mention the technological advances; modems are certainly a throwback, as are AOL chatrooms. (What do people even use to chat with now? Is it still IM, or has Skype and the video equivalent thereof taken over? Or do people who used to chat just write on each others' Facebook pages instead? Cell phones? Hi, I'm a dinosaur.)

Speaking of the nineties, I was shopping for a pair of khaki pants last week, and for a brief moment, among the short, floral-pattern skirts and plaid shirts, I wondered if I'd time-traveled back to 1995. Apparently we're having a nineties revival. A little disturbing is that--seeing as we're still in the throes of eighties leggings and off-the-shoulder shirts--this will be the second revival I will have lived through where I have first-hand experience with the original. Thankfully, though, I have seen no sign of mom jeans returning. (I don't even care what they look like, I just remember them being very uncomfortable.)

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I watched last week's Fringe, but found myself with nothing much to say on it. It was good! In a non-specific sort of way. Okay, I do have one thing: ( Spoiler )

Wit (2001)
aka The Perfect Storm of Elements Combining to Make Me Bawl Like a Child for Half an Hour.

First there's the play itself, which, when I read it a couple years ago, knocked me utterly breathless. It is, in short, about Vivian Bearing, an English professor--a Donne scholar--in the last stages of ovarian cancer. She faces her own death as analytically as she has her life, using the lens of the comma--not semicolon--dividing life and death at the end of "Death be not proud." She finds, as the play continues, that metaphysical wit is not enough armor for this challenge, and comes to rely on the compassion of her nurse, Susie.

Of the metaphysical poets, I've always found Donne the most affecting. Even if you don't like him, the things Edson does with his verse and the abstract versus the concrete are just incredible, and I can't recommend the play enough. It's a wonderful treatment of what literature can do for us--and what it ultimately cannot.

So there's that. I went into this figuring no matter what they did, I was going to wind up sniffling for a while, because it's this text. Then the movie added Emma Thompson, among other extremely good actors, and I thought, "Oh, dear."

And then they added Arvo Part's "Spiegel im Spiegel." And I realized I was not going to make it through this movie without a box of kleenex.

AND THEN THEY ADDED THE SECOND MOVEMENT OF GORECKI'S SYMPHONY NO. 3. BECAUSE THEY REALLY WANTED ME TO SUFFER. It took, literally, two notes for me to a.) recognize it, and b.) start wibbling. Yeah, so, modern Eastern European composers kind of have a lock on my emotions, 'cause their compositions make anguish concrete. If there is a sadder piece of music in this world than this symphony, I don't want to know about it, because I truly don't think I could handle it.

The filmmakers liked to tease the audience with both pieces of music, using them in bits and pieces, exquisitely, but also knowing when no background music would be just as exquisite. (Scene with Vivian, Susie, and the popsicles, I'm looking at you.) And then...and then there was the scene where they used all eleven-odd minutes of "Spiegel." It's the one where Vivian's old professor, E.M. Ashford, comes to visit her, almost purely by chance, while Vivian is perhaps a day or two from death and in considerable pain. She has, by this point, realized that while Donne is fascinating and even comforting in the abstract, death is an altogether too tangible reality for poetry. She's lost pretty much all power of speech, but somehow seems to communicate this to Ashford when she asks if Vivian would like her to recite something. Instead, she reads a book she was taking to her great-grandson, The Runaway Bunny. And you know, I'm sure what was happening on screen was beautiful and powerful, and each of them had perfect facial expressions, and the camera work continued to be as magnificent as it had been all through the movie. I saw practically none of it, because by the time Ashford read, "'If you become a fish in a trout stream,' said his mother, 'I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you,'" and called it "a little allegory of the soul--wherever it hides, God will find it," I was curled in a ball wondering if one box of kleenex would be enough to see out the end of the film.*

So in lieu of anything actually intelligent to say about the movie, I give you all of the above. I also give you the recommendation that it is, I think, the most affecting--and, for values of "best" where it is equal to "most affecting," best--movie I've seen in ten years. I also give you the following quotes, one which made me cackle, and one which, well, you know what I probably did by now.

"Wasn't that [grand doctors round] grand? Full of subservience, hierarchies, gratuitous displays, sublimated rivalries...I feel completely at home. It is just like a graduate seminar."

"You cannot imagine how time...can be...so...still. It hangs. It weighs. And yet there is so little of it. It goes so slowly, and yet it is so scarce."


* You can watch the scene here. Obviously, I recommend tissues.