You Say Tomato

For My Next Trick, I'll Spin Some Plates

Thank God multitasking has made goofballs of us all. Right now, I’m surfing the Web to read how newspapers around the world are covering the outbreak of war, I’ve got MSNBC’s TV feed playing but muted on Windows Media Player (there's a live feed available on the Intranet, though I don't imagine anybody looks at it when we're not at war), and the BBC World Service playing on RealPlayer. Not bad for someone who doesn't have a TV or a radio in her office. If I still had any powers of concentration left, I’d be climbing the walls right now.

Well, At Least I Have an Excuse Now

I don't imagine I'll be blogging much now that the war's started. Work will be crazy, since we'll be publishing at all hours. My heart will be saying tomato, though.

If This Blog Entry Wore a T-Shirt ...

If this blog entry wore a T-shirt, here's what it would say: My author had a blissful, leisurely weekend, and all I got was this lousy entry.

I had such good intentions for writing lots of entries since this was one of those lovely weekends without obligations. Instead I saw two movies (The Quiet American and Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary), caught up on my TV addictions (EastEnders, Corrie, Six Feet Under, and The Trials of Henry Kissinger, which is not an addiction), did just a smidgeon of art (it's art camp in three weeks, and I haven't done an artistic deed in months), hung out with R, balanced my checkbook, and started reading a fabulous new book, More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America's War in Colombia.

I did not do my Russian homework, write multiple mind-blowing blog entries, or figure out how to get rid of the extraneous information in the Blogamp display at the right. (If anyone knows how to tweak it so that it displays just the artist and the song, please pass it on.)

Man Trapped in Comments Box

Apparently there’s only one way to get him out of there: Post like mad (a maximum of five times per person) in that self-same comments box. If the entry accumulates more than 235 comments by midnight GMT on Friday, he'll donate ₤100 to Comic Relief. (That's a big annual U.K. charity drive, my American friends.) Confused? You will be.

A Night at the Opera

Went to the opera last night—Bellini’s Norma—and a great relief it was. The season had seemed cursed: A terrible cough that hit on the day of the season opener kept me from what was, by all accounts, an excellent Eugene Onegin. Then when my season ticket pal wasn’t able to make it to No. 2, I invited a friend who’d just had her second baby and had been stuck in the house for months. We made it through dinner and the first act, but the intermission was so long it gave her a chance to call home, and the screaming (literally) children and harried husband had her fleeing before the second act—with me in tow since I didn’t have enough cash on me for a cab. At opera ticket prices, even in Seattle, that was a pretty expensive one act so far this year.

I’m glad to say the curse was lifted last night. Norma was played by a 33-year-old—Christine Goerke—who was really good, but the woman who played Adalgisa—Ewa Podles—was incredible. She was listed in the program as a contralto, but her voice was otherworldly. She had a huge range and sounded good from top to bottom, but she had no head voice, just a deep, throaty, full chest voice. When she sang with the soprano or tenor, it was as if their voices were Americanos and hers was a latte. (How’s that for a Seattle analogy?) Someone said they’d heard a commentator remark that when she sang the part it was as close as you can get these days to the original performance, which would’ve been sung by a castrato. I’m not sure that’s really true, but when she first came on stage, I admit I got out the glasses to see if it was a countertenor in drag—a sort of reverse trouser role. At curtain, Podles got a standing ovation, while everyone else got rapturous, though slightly less OTT, applause. It must have been awkward for Goerke—who was wonderful—to know that Podles was getting a more passionate response, though the star system required her not to acknowledge that.

The last time I saw Norma—in 1994—was also the first time I saw the divine Jane Eaglen. Carol Vaness, who was supposed to play Norma, had to drop out less than a week before the first performance, so they flew in this English woman who had sung the role in London. As I remember it, the big flap was having to remake the costumes—Jane is very big and bomb, and Carol Vaness had famously slimmed down a few years before. It must have been hell for the costume shop to find yards more fabric and remake the main character’s clothes in such a short time. But all that was irrelevant when Jane sang and blew everyone away.

It’s funny how often that sort of thing happens in opera, though I suppose it’s understandable given how delicate their voices are. It’s a classic mystery plot twist—“You say you were at the opera, yet you didn’t mention someone had to step in for the tenor at the last minute? Put on the cuffs, sergeant.”—but I’ve seen that happen lots of times. More than once I’ve seen two people play the same role in a performance. One time the gold cast member got a cold, but the silver cast tenor had already gone home, so the gold guy sang for the first act, then the silver dude arrived at intermission and finished out the opera. Then at the last Seattle Ring (my second complete cycle, thank you very much!), Siegfried had an accident toward the end of rehearsals and completely screwed up his knee. I can’t quite recall the details, but I know a young Englishman who was a much better physical fit for the part flew in to take over. I don’t think he knew all three operas, so maybe the “original” Siegfried sang from the wings one night, and I certainly remember a lot of prompting. Very exciting! Who says opera’s dull?

Happy International Women's Day

Happy International Women’s Day! I can’t say that I did much to celebrate—I finished yet another ridiculous Left Behind novel (No. 3), took a walk down to the street for CD shopping and coffee, then spent a ridiculous number of hours feeding my CD collection into my laptop’s maw so I could compile a database of my CD collection.

I can’t really understand how I came to spend my Friday evening and Saturday moving CDs from the piece of flat-pack furniture that’s supposed to hold my collection (it’s sadly inadequate, but there’s no room for any more CD or bookshelves in the apartment) to the bedroom so that I could put them in and take them out of the laptop’s CD player—it certainly wasn’t how I’d planned to spend the first half of the weekend—but Friday evening while I was waiting for a tardy writer to file his copy, I was reading not.so.soft, when I noticed a link to “CD list.” Fascinating, and something I’d been thinking about doing for a while, without any progress, of course. Then I noticed that the list had been compiled with a bit of freeware, and before I had a chance to think about what I was getting myself into, I was opening and closing the CD bay door like a maniac. Without digging out the discs that are scattered around the house, manually adding the details for the CDs that CDDB didn’t recognize, or worrying about whatever is sitting on my desk at work, the total was 225. Fewer than I’d expected, but as I’ve said before, there were several years in the last decade where I bought—and listened to—hardly any music.

I’ve left a lot of CDs—and even more records—in the various places I’ve lived since leaving home. Until I arrived in Seattle 12 (yikes!) years ago, I was pretty flighty—a year in a city was a long time, and since I always traveled light, a lot got left behind. (Since I don’t drive, if I couldn’t carry it on the train—or on occasion the plane—I had to abandon it.) I was a pretty bratty abandoner of stuff, too. When I left London for the last time (I suppose I should say “the most recent”—you never know), I didn’t have a lot of notice (I was waiting for a visa to come through), so I just jammed a ton of stuff into the wardrobe of the room I’d been renting in a Stoke Newington council flat, and took off. I intended to return for it, but, well, I never have. (And I'm sure it's long gone by now.)

I’ve lost some CDs to thieves. When I lived in that Stoke Newington flat, we were robbed one Christmas when we were all off in North America for the holidays (it was sort of a scam that we had the flat, but that’s another story). I had a bunch of jazz CDs stolen, some of them unavailable in Britain. A few weeks later, I was in that jazz store near King’s Cross when I saw one of my records—but of course there was no way to prove it was mine, though I’m convinced mine was the only copy of that disc in Britain.

I also have a lot of music that’s not on CD—either stuff I downloaded from the Internet—quite legally, mind you, I’m a happy subscriber to Emusic.com—or albums from my days doing a jazz radio show in D.C. Once again, I left the vast majority of those records behind when I left Washington, but a friend once brought me a few of them when she drove out for a visit. Since I don’t have a turntable at the moment, I don’t ever listen to those reminders of another time and place.

But back to International Women’s Day. Back in D.C. the women’s radio collective I belonged to used to take over the station—WPFW—for IWD and provide 24 hours of music by women. Because I didn’t have a mainstream job, I usually took the graveyard shift. Every time I see or hear Tania Maria’s “3 a.m.” I remember playing that song more or less at 3 a.m. on International Women’s Day.

In Spain, IWD is (or was when I lived there) a time for marches and general noise-making. On one of those marches I realized that two of the women who also worked at the academy as me were a couple, not so much because they were marching—lots of hets were yelling “No te prives, gritalo! Mari Pili te quiero!”—but because they were wearing each other’s shoes.

New Store in the Neighborhood

We spent last weekend in Ballard doing a workshop, and at lunch and on Saturday evening, we found all manner of cool stuff to eat and do out there. Ballard seems to have morphed from the tragically unhip home of elderly Scandinavians to a happening hangout for hippy artists who like to eat good, cheap food. We didn’t have a lot of time for lunch, but we had excellent Thai and Indian food, and we managed to find an hour to browse among Turtle Press’ fine inventory—taking a good bit of it with us when we left.

One store that completely blew me away was Sonic Boom, an amazing record store, specializing in “Northwest and indie label records and CDs,” that I’d never even heard of before. I only had about five minutes to browse and buy, but I still managed to put my hands on two CDs I’d had no luck finding anywhere else (Remixes and Every Day, by Cinematic Orchestra—they’re not rare or anything, it’s just that none of the stores I went into seemed to stock them). Since it was such a brief visit, I blindly grabbed at a bunch of postcards and flyers on my way out the door, and I was astonished to learn from one of them that the mysterious new tenants of the space that until recently was the home of Chameleon Books in my very own neighborhood are … none other than Sonic Boom! They even have a bunch of “in-store” appearances lined up, but not with local schmoes—folks like Supergrass and Stephen Malkmus will be performing four blocks from my home!

I have a feeling I’ll be buying more CDs.

The Lawn War

This weekend we went to a workshop in Ballard, and on the street where we parked, lots of the houses had lawn signs—almost all arguing against a war on Iraq. But on one section there was a little mini-war. One neighbor had a whole heap of hand-made pro-liberation signs (hell, he'd probably be OK with "pro-war"), and two doors down, another resident had added to the prefab "No Iraq War" placards with a few signs of his own. A regular little United Nations it was.

As they say on Law & Order, almost, here are their signs:


Attack Iraq; War Soon; Anti-War? Saddam's Fools//Scammed Into Fear & War

Perhaps I Really Am a Religious Maniac

I’ve had a “thing” about the number 3 for as long as I can remember. It’s not an obsessive compulsion, I don’t think—when I lived in London, I used to ride the 73 bus every day; I wouldn’t turn down a drink at the Three Wheatsheafs—but I try to avoid multiples of three. Some examples of my mania: I never set my alarm clock for a time that is divisible by three; I never take three items of food (don’t be offering me three cookies), but I’m not crazy enough that I wouldn’t eat a meal that had three different food items on it (I don’t insist on meat and one veg), nor do I count the food after it’s on the plate (so no green bean roll call). Also, I don't insist on a change if a hotel puts me in Room 303, and weirdly enough I always seem to be put in "3" rooms.

Still, it is a bit peculiar, and more peculiar still is that I have no idea why I do this. Today’s Guardian—the paper from 03/03/03, that is—offers some insight.

OK, Now This Really Does Qualify as a Personal Web Page

You’ve got to have a picture of your cat, right? And was there ever a cuter cat than Sooky?



And, erm, that's all!

Bum Wrap

Snopes says it's an urban legend that Japanese women are walking around in see-through skirts. No, they're just "prints on the skirts to make it look as if the panties are visible." Not that that helped when my boss came into my office just now as I was examining the evidence!

British Academy Film Awards 2003: The British Oscars

A quick response to the British Oscars that we watched in preference to the Grammys, which I suppose is evidence that I value movies more than music. (And more than penises, apparently, since I also chose it over the final episode of Oz!)

1. Although in theory I dislike Stephen Fry, in practice he’s a bloody good presenter/raconteur/wit. When Meryl Streep was reading Charlie Kaufman’s bizarre acceptance speech and misread “I’d like to spank—I’m sorry, I’d like to thank Spike Jonze,” it took a very quick mind to quip, “Thank goodness it wasn’t William Jones.” (But can we stop pretending that Donald Kaufman exists? “Neither Charlie nor Donald are here to accept it?” Puh-lease)

2. Pedro Almodóvar is the master of puzzling poetics. Like his mystifying speech when he won the best foreign-language Oscar for All About My Mother, even when the English was correct and even though his accent had improved, what he said sounded very poetic—moonlight, darkness, Iraq, captain—but didn’t make a whole heap of sense.

3. The acting challenge of the night seemed to be for U.S. actors not to give away their personal feelings when Pedro, Gael García Bernal, and Saul Zaentz made their anti-war comments. Meryl Streep and Jennifer Connelly were particularly effective at transmitting “blank face.”

4. The BBC zoomed right in on the “losers,” and I swear there was more openly displayed disappointment on display than you get at U.S. awards shows.

5. It might be a good idea to trim the number of ancient presenters. Lord Attenborough might be the chairman of the academy, but when he repeatedly referred to the potential winner of the Carl Foreman Award as “he” or said the winner would be able to use the cash payment to fund “his” next project, he seemed unaware that one of the nominees was a “she” who’d be using it for “her” next project. Surprise, surprise, the woman didn’t win. Michael Caine wasn’t that bad, but it was puzzling to see him reading her nomination script from a piece of paper. (Last-minute changes? TelePrompTer anxiety?)

6. For an irrational reason (perhaps Billy Elliott-related), I have taken against Stephen Daldry, who always seemed to have a naff look on his face whenever the camera pointed at him. Consequently, I took an evil pleasure in Philip Glass referring to him, throughout his acceptance speech as “Michael Daldry.”

7. Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Salma Hayek, Nicole Kidman: Bless! OK, and Catherine Zeta-Jones too.

Bend It Like Beckham

On Thursday night, R and I went to a preview screening of Bend It Like Beckham. I wasn’t sure that they’d manage to fill the cinema for a soccer movie whose title 99 percent of Americans will find incomprehensible, but when we got to the Guild 45th, there was a line all around the block—the usual free-film suspects, but also a bunch of youth soccer girls and lots of Indian families.

One of my co-workers refuses to see British movies—especially feelgood comedies in which downtrodden young people/miners/prisoners/widows/mixed-race families/unemployed steelworkers dance/blow brass instruments/garden/grow marijuana/sculpt sex organs/strip through the pain. Seen one brave escape from working class philistinism/Thatcher/criminality/poverty/grotty back streets/emasculating joblessness, you’ve seen them all, he reckons. I don’t disagree, but I must admit, I loved this movie.

It’s a feel-good fiesta, an uplift-athon: not just an escape narrative but also a sports story—two genres that offer few surprises. The working-class lad always gets the ballet scholarship; the soccer player always scores the winning goal. And in a film about an Indian family, mom and dad are always going to fret about the loss of traditional values while the next generation pushes up against the old ways. And yet, and yet … the film was knockout, magic, over the moon.

Jess is a tomboy: She wears trackies and loves to kick the bawl abaht. Her ma and pa are middle-class Sikhs who emigrated from Kenya decades ago. They live in a nice house in Hounslow, and dad works at Heathrow Airport. There’s a bit of "Goodness Gracious Me" head-bobbing action over Jess’ lack of marital prospects and her preference for watching soccer rather than perfecting her Punjabi cooking, but thank goodness sister Pinky has just got engaged. Jess talks to her posters of David Beckham the way her mom prays to Baba Ji. When Jules, a young (gorgeous) white woman asks her to try out for the local women’s soccer team, Jess has to deceive her folks (not terribly convincingly) so she can train and fulfill her role as savior of the soccer squad. She’s torn between respecting her family and using her talent to help her team, and in the end—never!—she gets to do both.

Jess and Jules do the old 1-2 to perfection, are mistaken for a couple, fall out over a guy, but make up and score again just in time for the movie’s big finish. There’s adversity, there’s triumph over adversity, there’s a gorgeous, pouting bit of tracksuit trou for the girls to fight over. (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who plays the coach as a paragon of virtue and a fountain of sage advice, basically has the role of the “good girl” who shows up in most sports movies—the plucky, virtuous pretty thing who watches over the hero and motivates him along the path of righteousness.)

So what did I like? The acting was great. The only faces I recognized were Rhys-Meyers and the always awesome Juliet Stevenson, but there wasn’t a dud in the cast. Yes, there were a lot of “ish-shoes,” but overall they were nicely handled. Writer/director Gurinder Chadha’s always good with gayness (see, for example, Kyra Sedgwick and Juliana Margulies as seriously sexy lesbians in her very American film What’s Cooking?), but it was particularly well-done here, especially considering that, in the States at least, the film is going to be marketed to teens.

In her 1993 film Bhaji on the Beach (I guess Chadha has a thing for alliterative B-titles), there were some lovely—and profound—observations about immigration and assimilation. Ten years later things have changed a lot, and she showed the changes very nicely. Socially, Asians in Britain have moved on up; they’re established. Indian guys dress better, and they do the washing up. Racism is more subtle. White (and black) people aren’t grumbling about being swamped by immigrants, but they still ask the same old questions about arranged marriages and have fixed ideas about Indian families.

I have no idea how the movie will do in the States. The title is meaningless here; the soccer commentator cameos might as well be in Punjabi; and as is always the case, the British social signifiers are lost on the American audience. Still, I hope it does well. A feel-good movie that makes you feel good deserves success.

NOTE: I had to redo this entry because for some reason the permalinks didn't work on the posts I made this morning. By deleting the original, I also deleted the comments that Pam and Anita had made. Many apologies for that. I'd love to have more comments on this site, so I feel particularly bad about deleting some of the few that I receive. Nothing personal, I promise!

Is My Accent Haut or Naut?

audblog audio post
I fear the sound quality of this audio post is rather poor because my phone, while it is capable of inducing "a technology boner that could cut glass," isn't always the best, you know, phone. Plus, I'm a mumbler. And, since the Sidekick's keyboard requires me to do an Alt-command to type the pound sign, there's a bit of goofy space at the end.

Still, since I'm really curious about other bloggers' accents, I figured it was only polite to show you mine. Do you think there's a meme in the making here?

I forgot I had promised to whistle. Since I've now used my free trial audblog posting, does this mean I'm going to have to pony up the $3 per month for a subscription?

Mainstream Movie Catch-Up

In a lot of ways this is a kind of dead zone for movies. Once the self-appointed Oscar hopefuls open in the last week or two in December, they tend to stick around in theaters until a) they fail to get nominated in mid-February; b) one movie (usually crap) comes out of Oscar night a big winner (then it stays around forever, while the others finally, mercifully depart and free up some movie screens); or c) the theater-owners finally decide everyone who wants to has had an opportunity to see the big movies and finally take pity and puts on something else.

Because I’ve found myself stuck with nothing to see all too often at this time of year, I went too far in the opposite direction this year, prioritizing movies that weren’t going to enjoy a three-month engagement. But now, for one reason and another, I worry that when Oscar night comes around there’ll be some contenders that I haven’t seen. Even for the British Academy Film Awards, which BBC America showed live and commercial-free this afternoon but which I taped because I was at the movies, I still need to see The Pianist and The Quiet American before I’d be allowed to vote under Troubled Diva/foreign-language film Oscar rules.

Still, I’ve done a bit of catching up in recent weeks, ticking off Adaptation, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Hours, and Chicago.

As far as Adaptation goes, you can count me in the “liked it OK until it jettisoned its conceit three-quarters’ way through” camp. That old enjoyment-squasher high expectations may be one reason I was underwhelmed. After Being John Malkovich, I had very high hopes for another Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman collaboration, but this time around it fell short of the “brilliant and incredibly innovative” mark and got stuck at “self-consciously trying to be edgy.” One pleasant surprise: I had forgotten what a wonderful actress Meryl Streep is. Twenty years ago (Jesus, I never thought I’d begin a sentence that way), I would make a point of seeking out and seeing every one of her movies as soon as they came out. Julia, Manhattan, The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs. Kramer, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, even Plenty. But after Defending Your Life in 1991, I think the only Streep movie I saw in a theater was 1994’s The River Wild (!), then nothing until Adaptation. She’s one of those actors who are made for the movies (like Michael Caine): Her performance seems effortless; there’s nothing “actorly” about it. Plus she’s lovely. In Adaptation, the contrast with the very artificial, effortful Nicolas Cage was astounding. There he is huffing and puffing and letting us know he’s an actor; there she is just sort of inhabiting the role and being totally convincing. (The worst “I’m an ACT-or” offender is Edward Norton. I really enjoyed The 25th Hour, but throughout the movie you're aware of a guy laboriously playing a part.)

The Two Towers? Well, I’m not its demographic. I saw the first one as a work “morale event” (the most morale-enhancing part of those movie screening trips is being away from e-mail for three hours, of course; well, that and the free snacks), and I enjoyed it well enough, but it didn’t make me want to go out and read the books or anything (a common enough reaction judging from my pals’ reading habits in December 2001). Considering it’s the middle bit, the narrative was strong—I was never restless or bored, and the effects are spectacular and strangely convincing—but there weren’t really any actors for me to connect with. In The Fellowship of the Ring Ian Holm and Sir Ian McKellen made Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf into real characters; in this movie the complex characters were absent for most of the time. There are characters who are onscreen a lot, but they didn’t seem particularly real or likable. (OK, Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn is a decent enough character, although a bit too much of a goody-goody for my tastes, but his beard annoys me. The dwarf and the elf, or whatever Legolas is, I could very easily live without.) Still, there’s no doubt Peter Jackson did an incredible job with this series of movies. John Scalzi predicts that Jackson will get a special Oscar for the trilogy. That would surprise me, but I don’t see why he couldn’t win best director (and maybe best picture) next year—after all, the two-thirds I’ve seen so far are certainly of superior quality to most Oscar-winning movies, and let’s let go of the fantasy that the academy rewards high-brow pointy-head movies. (Should you doubt, I direct you to the Best Picture winners for 1990, 1994, 1995, 1997, 2000, and 2001.)

The Hours? Precious, historically iffy, and heavy sledding in parts, but saved by some fabulous acting. Although at times it was hard to know what was going on inside Clarissa’s head, Meryl Streep was always in control; she never seemed lost. Julianne Moore is always so damned convincing—she’s another actress who’s always in command of her character. I’ve been a fan of Nicole Kidman’s since the TV mini-series Bangkok Hilton, but I’m not sure she was right for the role of Virginia Woolf, with or without the prosthetic proboscis. Still, the movie had a strong emotional impact, and that counts for a lot in my book.

And then there was Chicago. Having just seen this just a few hours ago, I’m stunned it got so many Oscar nominations. As an exemplar of a lost genre, I understand that the academy—largely made up, after all, of actors who spent a fortune on voice and dance classes—wants to revive the musical, but it’s so darned run-of-the-mill, obvious, and unsexy. Catherine Zeta-Jones shows that we Welshwomen are gifted with great pipes (yeah, yeah, I’m a Mancunian, but I’m ethnically Welsh and that’s what counts over here); Renée Zellweger is a bloody good actress, a decent singer, and an iffy dancer (though she’s got a great pair of gams); Richard Gere’s awfully good-looking and a not-terrible singer; Queen Latifah rocks; John C. Reilly plays the part John C. Reilly always plays (which makes him one of the actors I’d most like to hang out with for a few days—I’d love to know if he’s anything like the schlubs he’s always cast as), but giving four of those five a 1-in-5 chance of winning an Oscar? I don’t think so. As much as I love Queen Latifah, I just can’t see that even after that spectacular dance number (the only bit of true raunch in the whole film), her performance was award-worthy. Though I suppose after Judi Dench won best supporting actress for about 10 minutes of screen time in Shakespeare in Love, all bets are off.