I didn’t, though, so I only just tonight ran across the home page for London’s musical theater production of Lord of the Rings.

It looks amazing in terms of production design and pure spectacle, and the video clips are worth a gawk or two. I have to wonder, though, how LotR is being staged without turning into a nine hour production, a la Wagner.

(Not an inappropriate comparison, come to think of it. In fact, a Slashdotter notes, “Just watch, LOTR, the musical, will be released in Germany under the title ‘Das Rheingold’. I think most of the adaptation work has been done on the German version by some guy named Wagner.”)

From what you can hear on the show’s website, though, I’m not sold on the music. I’m too much in love with Howard Shore’s soundtracks for the LotR movies, and this music is a re-imagining more along the lines of Le Miz or Wicked. And I like the music from those shows, but each of them has a very different atmosphere from what I associate with LotR. There’s a clash of styles.

…but if I were in London right now, I’d go anyway. See the note on the show’s page that says it looks great from the 15 pound seats way up in the balcony? That would be me.

(Actually, I think LotR is currently in the theater where I saw The Producers. Which was awesome from the balcony.)

An Ancient Muse is perhaps not her strongest album to date (mind you, I have three candidates for that title), but it does have many lovely pieces. The style and sound are the Loreena we know and love, mixing the Middle Eastern influences she has explored since 1994’s The Mask and Mirror with the expressive Celtic palatte that marks all of her music. Muse reminds me of Mask and Mirror in that it seems to be set in a more Eastern atmosphere than recordings like 1997’s The Book of Secrets, which stays mostly in western Europe (”The Mummers’ Dance,” “Skellig,” “The Highwayman,” “Dante’s Prayer,” etc.), but looks to the East a few times along the way. Muse seems to live in Greece, Turkey, Arabia: the first track is called “Incantation,” but it seems also to be an invocation in the Homeric sense of calling for guidance from the album’s eponymous muse. Homer is more directly referenced later in the album through “Penelope’s Song,” a haunting call from Odysseus’s patient queen, and in between we visit “The Gates of Istanbul,” walk “Beneath a Phrygian Sky,” and water our camels at a “Caravanserai.” We only leave that space a couple of times, going to the Scottish border in “The English Ladye and the Knight” and putting on our yarmulkes to dance a “Sacred Shabbat.”

Though I love that Muse opens with an invocation, the album doesn’t really find its voice until “Caravanserai,” the third track; it’s the first one on the disc with a refrain that you want to join in. The tuneful beauty holds up to closer inspection, too, as the lyrics explore what the concept of “home” means if you live a nomadic lifestyle. Following it, “The English Ladye” presents characters who are very bound to their walls — both physical castle walls and the boundary between Scotland and northern England.

“Penelope’s Song,” “Beneath a Phrygian Sky,” and “Never-Ending Road” have also become favorites of mine, and “Kecharitomene” holds its own among the best of Loreena’s instrumental pieces. Buying the album from Barnes and Noble also gets you a second disc with “Raglan Road,” which is nice as well.

I was particularly fascinated during the concert by watching the instrumentalists: how often do you get to see a hurdy-gurdy play almost every song? Loreena herself changed instruments between songs, sometimes playing the harp, sometimes keyboard or accordion (yes, I said accordion), often piano. There were eight or nine instrumentalists around her — the cello got a lot of excercise and there were four or five different kinds of drums, played by three or four drummers. Violin, viola, and something else that was played with a bow. Two men played both accoustic and electric guitar and bass. The guitarist also had a mandolin-looking instrument — the program calls it a Celtic Bouzouki — some songs called for both that and the electric guitar, so he would wear the guitar and had the bouzouki on a stand where he could stand behind the stand and play it around his guitar! Loreena referred to the instrumentalists as her “idling Porsches,” because they are capable of so much more than they get to do in her songs.

Loreena was lovely and the crowd absolutely adored her. Mostly they went straight from one song to the next, but a few times she paused to speak between numbers. She talked about her travels and the background of a couple of pieces (sounding like the liner notes in her albums, which are always so interesting), introduced the musicians, and talked a little bit about touring, which she compared to cooking — after all the traveling, writing, recording, etc., a concert is the meal where she finally gets to share what she has prepared.

The majority of the songs they played were from old albums, but they also played more from the new CD than from any other one. If you’d like to re-create the experience, you can pull together:

She Moved through the Fair (Elemental)
The Gates of Istanbul (Ancient Muse)
Mummers’ Dance (Book of Secrets)
Bonny Portmore (The Visit)
The Highwayman (Book of Secrets)
Dante’s Prayer (Book of Secrets)
The Bonny Swans (Mask and Mirror)
Caravanserai (Ancient Muse)
–intermission–
Raglan Road (Ancient Muse)
The Mystic’s Dream (Mask and Mirror)
Santiago (Mask and Mirror)
The Lady of Shalott (The Visit)
Beneath a Phrygian Sky (Ancient Muse)
The Old Ways (The Visit)
Never-Ending Road (Ancient Muse)
–encores–
Beltane Fire Dance (Parallel Dreams)
Penelope’s Song (Ancient Muse)

Yes, two encores!

I was impressed and surprised that she chose to do both Highwayman and Lady of Shalott, probably the two longest songs in her repetoire. They didn’t seem long, though… It did make me think about having to remember all those words all night, because she dropped a line in Highwayman — though of course she was right on with the next line and probably anyone who didn’t know all the words wouldn’t have noticed. I wonder if it’s easier to remember words to songs when you’ve written them yourself?

And yes…I got the t-shirt. The front says “Tell me, O Muse, of those who travelled far and wide,” which is the opening of the Odyssey.

My roommate and spent the middle of March apartment hunting, under the impression that we would have to move when our lease ran out on June 1. Our current building is gradually being rennovated and sold as condos, but as it turns out, that process is going more slowly than the owners anticipated (as I understand it, real estate is a buyer’s market right now), so they’re letting us renew the lease for another year. So that means I don’t get to be rid of our stained carpets, stained countertops, and finicky shower, but I am very glad to not have to move. Besides, I love the area around us, so I’m glad not to leave just yet.

School is almost finished for the spring — my last class is next Tuesday. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Research Paper Land, Group Presentation Land, and Final Project Land, but the end is in sight. Of course, there’s still a last paper, project revisions, and poetry revisions to do in the next week, but still — light, tunnel, yeah.

Funny little story involving the denim bag with the Cherokee alphabet that my cousin made for me. It was sitting behind me in class last week when my classmate, A., looks at it and says, “Is that the Cherokee alphabet?” I say yes it is — but looking at it, the top (where it says what it is) is hidden in a fold of cloth. “How did you know?!” I ask. Apparently he studied linguistics in college. Impressive!

Baseball season has started, which is a big deal up here! I don’t pay much attention, and I still know more about what’s going on in baseball than I ever have.

While we’re on sports, the Boston Marathon was just over a week ago. The weather was dreadful, but not quite dreadful enough to call it off. I was at school all day and the marathon ends very near here, so when I went wandering around 2:30, it was just ending and there were lots of runners everywhere, each with a support group of friends and family as well as a bright orange Adidas bag and a silver mylar blanket (looks like aluminum foil for humans, invented for the space program, I think?)

Since then, it’s warmed up and finally feels like spring! It was so strange to think that school was about to end when I was still wearing my wool coat every day.

Despite being swamped, I did finally finish season 3 of Babylon 5, so I’m in great suspense about how Sheridan will get out of that pit! Triumph over a Balrog, perhaps? I just know that he does, because (refrain) I’ve seen season 5… But the series makes it pretty clear that the outcome is never the point (we know from the first episode that Londo and G’Kar die at each other’s hands); what matters is how we get there.

I highly recommend Radioland Murders, which is kind of a cross between Clue and A Prarie Home Companion. Good fun! I’m half way through The Emperor and the Assassin — it’s moving very slowly, and I’m not sure how the two plots are going to come together…with luck I’ll have a chance to finish it tomorrow night. And then I’ve saved Twelfth Night for last, so maybe Friday or later in the weekend, and then Liz will actually get her DVDs back! They’re coming, I promise.

In between, I’ve also discovered (after the clip I linked to here has made me curiouser and curiouser) that lots and lots of Doctor Who can be found on YouTube…

The big excitement of last weekend was the Loreena McKennitt concert I went to on Saturday! Fabulous…but I think it needs a post of its own!

So of course iTunes is bringing up some of the strangest things in my collection. But a few should be gimmes. Have fun!

1. So I called up the captain, ‘please bring me my wine’
He said, ‘we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.’
“Hotel California”–The Eagles.    E.

2. Shall I not be on a pedestal,
Worshipped and competed for?
Not be carried off, or better still,
Cause a little war?
???–Camelot soundtrack with Julie Andrews.    (Tae)

3. I wish they’d stop pretending they pray for me,
‘Cause really all it is, is just the third degree.
Can we just decide that there is a line
Knowing is theirs and what is mine?

4. There’s beautiful girls here, oh, never you mind,
with beautiful shapes nature never designed,
And lovely complexions, all roses and cream
but let me remark with regard to the same
That if at those roses you venture to sip,
the colors might all come away on your lip!

5. Just like a busy bee, each new philosophy
Can fly from tree to tree and keep me moving
When life’s a dizzy maze on alternating days
I choose a different phrase!

6. I am umbilically connected to the temperate zone
It brought me life, it brought me love I never have outgrown…
In one way or the other we’re all refugees
Living out this easy life below the banyan trees
Smoothing off the rougher edges of the culture clash.
???–Jimmy Buffett.    (Tae)

7. They interview the kid
Oh, training they forbid
Because Yoda sensed in him much fear
And Qui-Gon said “Now listen here”
“Just stick it in your pointy ear,
I still will teach this boy.”
???–Weird Al.    (E)

8. Someday I’ll be a holy man with saffron on me nose,
I’ll shave my head like Gandhi and I’ll never wear no clothes,
To see the Irish Guru, they’ll come from near and far,
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Whiskey in the Jar!

9. You can like the life you’re living,
You can live the life you like.
You can even marry Harry,
But mess around with Ike.
“Nowadays”–Chicago soundtrack.    Tae.

10. It has a tender sound,
This little tune I found,
I don’t know why it’s following me around.

11. Your heart is hard as stone or mahogany,
That’s why I’m in such exquisite agony.
“The Masochism Tango”–???.    (E)

12. Why did you keep the mousetrap?
Why did you keep the dishrack?
These things used to be mine,
I guess they still are, I want ‘em back!

13. Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids –
In fact it’s cold as hell.
And there’s no one there to raise them, if you did.
“Rocket Man”–Elton John.    Carmen.

14. God bless Mother Nature, she’s a single woman too.
She took off to heaven and she did what she had to do.
She taught every angel to rearrange the sky,
So that each and every woman could find her perfect guy.

15. Somewhere just beyond my reach
There’s someone reaching back for me.
Racing on the thunder and rising with the heat,
It’s gonna take a superman to sweep me off my feet.

16. You can spray her wherever you figure the streptococci lurk.
You can give her a shot for whatever’s she’s got, but it just won’t work.
If she’s tired of getting the fish eye from the hotel clerk,
A person can develop a cold.
“Adelaide’s Lament”–Guys & Dolls soundtrack.    Tae.

17. We all have got a spot of farce in us,
but only some of us are larcenous.
And few still the divine thrill in us,
that comes from being truly villainous.

18. I’m still young, don’t forget
It isn’t over yet –
So many hearts for me to thrill.
If you’re not here to say
How good I look each day,
I’ll have to find someone who will.

19. Years from the land of the bird,
And I’m still feelin’ the spirit.
5,000 light years from Birdland,
But I know people can hear it.

20. Singing, come out upon my seas,
Curse missed opportunities,
Am I part of the cure,
Or am I part of the disease?

This particular poem is a description (of sorts) of a night at Furman when I was walking to my apartment one evening, probably going home at ten from a CCLC shift. It was a foggy night and I came around the corner into a slightly wooded area around the apartments and a little way ahead of me was this girl who was practicing for a kickline or something — literally taking three steps and then throwing a leg up over her head, three steps, kick, three steps, kick.

Well, strange thing that my brain is, it comes up with the Saggy Baggy Elephant, who goes around the jungle dancing one, two, three, kick! one, two, three, kick! Is this ringing a bell to anybody?

Saggy Baggy’s nothing new — the story is copyright 1942 and has probably been in print ever since. I grew up with it…my parents grew up with it…but apparently most of my poetry class did not.

Apparently my perception of things every American child is familiar with is way off, because they weren’t getting my nursery rhyme reference either. I had titled the poem “A Misty, Moisty Evening,” playing off (do I really have to explain this?) “One Misty Moisty Morning.” It didn’t come up in discussion, but when everyone gave me the copies of the poem that they had marked up and critiqued for me there were all manner of “Moist is such a scary word, is that really what you want?” and “You’ve said misty, do you need to have moist there too?” The best anyone could do was my professor, who asked as we started to discuss the poem, whether I was playing off the title of a Steeleye Span (who the hell?) song that apparently used the lyrics of an old English song — which must be where the nursery rhyme came from in the first place.

Really, people! What happened to Mother Goose? Do my poems suddenly require footnotes? I’m not T.S. Eliot, damn it, and this isn’t The Waste Land! Will somebody tell me that this roomful of poets was an anomaly?

…

I would like to give the class the credit they deserve, though. They were really helpful with the last poem I turned in and, despite the above, I got a lot of useful feedback last night, too. But I’m a little worried. I know that I come up with really obscure references sometimes, but I thought I had a better perception of what is and is not obscure.

And while I’m speaking of the poetry class, the classmate who came out and said “I’m glad someone else read The Saggy Baggy Elephant,” is also my bag story #5. I had it on the table as I was putting my coat on a week or two ago and when he asked, he got the full story because he’s a nice guy.

Calmer now and looking at the lyrics to the Steeleye Span song — they’re the same as the Schooner Fare version I’ve known for a long time (It was my brother B’s favorite song when he was very little, which was cute). It fits into Schooner Fare’s repetoire — they’re folk singers. But how do you suppose a British rock band does it? Curious. Of course, one of Simon and Garfunkel’s big hits was “Scarborough Fair,” so maybe it’s not so hard to imagine.

Have you got the twit blocked yet?

Composer wants to create a Harry Potter opera cycle.

Okay, give the lady credit. From the quotes in the above article, it sounds like she wants to use HP’s immense popularity to revitalise opera and make it interesting to kids. But I just get the feeling that some things should not be set to music. They talked about making a Star Trek musical at one point, after all. Not to mention the fact that opera singers are stereotypically middleaged and overweight for a reason: the voice doesn’t finish maturing until you’re about thirty and opera music is demanding. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done. But I don’t think it would be a service to the stories. The composer likes that HP is “pure epic” — but I don’t think epic and opera are as analogous as she would like to make out.

Fortunately for all involved, both J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers have denied permission for the project.

In other Harry news, I really want someone to remind this guy ['Harry won't die' says literature expert] that JKR has explicitly told us that Neville is NOT the chosen one. Voldemort made Harry the chosen one when he tried to kill him as a baby…because he percieved Harry, not Neville as a future threat.

I also think that the first point quoted in the article is bogus. YES, like in Dickens’ work, good has to win in the end, but that doesn’t require Harry to survive the book. He just has to take Voldemort with him if he does die.

I think what really gets my goat about that article is the way Prof. Krasner talks about Harry as though he’s got all the answers. Snape is “really fighting for good despite all appearances,” he says. Well, yes, the thought has crossed most of our minds, now hasn’t it? No call to sound presumptuous about it.

Pug and I spent the afternoon at the Florida Museum of Natural History, which turned out to be considerably bigger and cooler
than I expected. One of their big attractions is a large butterfly
enclosure, very nice, and we managed to be there during their butterfly release at 2pm. Since there are so many species, they just don’t have all the right plants that the various butterflies want to lay their eggs on, so nearly all of them are bought from “butterfly farms” and shipped to the museum as chrysalises, and a cageful of new butterflies are released into the main enclosure every few days.

Even without the new batch of flutterbyes, there were just butterflies everywhere, of all sorts of colors. One landed on my shoulder and hung out there for a while (several minutes) while we were watching the new butterflies get coaxed out of their cage. He finally flew off, but shortly after that, a gorgeous blue morpho started flying around us, and after landing briefly on Pug’s collar, finally landed on my cheek! After a while, I coaxed him onto my finger and he stayed there for a while before finally taking off. Definately up-close and personal.

Of course, “natural history museum” is always synonymous with
“fossils!!!” in my head. There were no dinosaurs here, but there were skeletons of a mammoth and a mastodon near the entrance, and there was a big room of early mammals – giant sloths and even giant-er sloths, saber toothed cats, little horses, armored armadillo-like creatures, and one huge bird that was the size of an ostrich with the head of an eagle. The biggest sloth had a hammock-sized ribcage, but this bird was the thing you didn’t want to meet in a dark jungle. Very happy with my fossil-fix.

There was also a really neat exhibit about the Calusa Indians from south Florida, and (as you’ll see on the front page if you go to the museum’s web site) a temporary exhibit of quilts depicting or inspired by “Natural Florida.” We had gotten about half-way through when we ran off to see the butterfly release, but there were some really pretty quilts – neat stuff done on machine, it looked like.

A friend Pug works with had told him about a music event that happens once a month on Saturday evenings, so the two of us and E. packed a picnic dinner and went to see what was what. They call it something like “Farm to Family” – basically, a bunch of people get together at some guy’s farm to play bluegrass music, and lots of people like us come to listen. We stayed for maybe three hours. The first act was okay because we were eating – they were good, but too much blues is really too much. We suffered through the second act. The singer/songwriter got up and admitted that he had failed at writing science fiction novels AND science fiction poetry, to the extent of having been booed off a coffee house stage…so now he was writing science fiction songs. It was bad. Best line: “I’m so out of tune…with you.” We all cracked up the first time we heard it. But the third and fourth groups were full bluegrass bands and lots of fun. Good toe-tapping music.

Sunday morning I went off to go do my liberal religion thing; E. was curious, so she tagged along, even though the sermon topic I saw online looked like it might be…not one I would choose for one to introduce someone to Unitarianism. Something like “The Sacred Act of Eating.” It turned out pretty well, though – it was a topic of interest to her.

Apparently this fellowship is just getting a new minister – or
rather, two ministers, a husband and wife pair. They’re starting in
August; all the July services are lay-led.

The service itself wasn’t so different from the UU church at home. Instead of reading off a list of visitors as part of the welcome and announcements like we do, though, they have a few minutes of stand-up-and-greet-the-people- around-you (which the Greenville fellowship does sometimes – Stacey and I hated that), only then if any members meet a visitor, they can stand up and introduce them to the rest of the congregation. There was a friendly old man sitting behind us who offered to introduce us, after which he offered the microphone to me and I said something very brief about having grown up as a UU in FWB, was new to the area, and here I was dragging a friend along to see this weird way of being religious. This is worth mentioning because a woman came up to me after the service and said that she had first gone to a UU church in Ft. Walton! I think she said it was in the 60’s and the way she described the group sounded like what I’ve heard about the beginnings of our fellowship. Remembered one couple who were particularly devoted to it and largely responsible for getting it going – I suspect she means the couple who have their photos in the back room (whose names I can’t remember…bad me), and when I described them that way, she laughed and said she was sure that was the case. And of course, she was very impressed to hear how much the fellowship has grown.

I wonder if there’s an influx of student-types during the school year? That seems to be true of anywhere else in Gainesville…

Reports of my graduation are still premature. (I have three more days of class. I get my piece of paper on June 3.)

So hello again! Carmen can stop frothing (geez, get a rabies shot!) and perhaps my rabid fans will be appeased.

Charlie Brown went off pretty well. Out first performance was out in the amphitheatre as planned — the forecast had been scaring us all week, but the only possible back-up location was already booked that first night. But the show went on! In fact, it did drizzle a little during the first act, but it cleared up after five or ten minutes and then it was lovely. Miraculously, the crowd didn’t leave!

Since we did have McAlister reserved for Friday and Saturday, we went ahead and moved to the auditorium Friday afternoon — and it did rain off and on all weekend, so we were glad we did. The show went better inside anyway (depite the fact that we were thoroughly turned around at first), so that was good. And there it was, my exit from Pauper Players. Sort of…I had set up a couple of video cameras during the last show, so I’ve been editing and burning copies of the video ever since. Finally got the last of those done this afternoon.

I also sang with Furman’s oratorio chorus (basically all the choruses combine to do a major work at Christmas and again in May) for the last time. I hadn’t been in women’s chorale since sophomore year (partly time constraints, partly personalities), so it was fun to be in a big chorus again. The performance was the day Pug arrived up here after his exams, so he got to come!

It was great fun to have my boy up here for a week, and he insists that he had a good time, despite the fact that he had to entertain himself while I went to class, worked at the CCLC, and wrote a research paper. I guess I even believe him, since after all I had a lovely time, despite going to class, working, and writing a research paper…

Some Linkages:

The Plains of Abraham: There is a Canadian classicist whose specialty is the performance aspect of Homeric poetry. So what does he do but write his own epic in the Homeric style about an event in Canadian history. And he goes around and performs it! He came to Furman the week between Charlie Brown and the oratorio — really cool!

NY Times on Da Vinci: Whatever you think about The Da Vinci Code, book or movie, check out this movie review from the New York Times. Harsh — but very funny! I thought the book was a good read and want to see the movie sooner or later, but it might wait for video. We shall see.

Speaking of movies, the group that brings films to Furman has been doing well this spring after performing way sub par for most of the year — they spent about two months advertising Saw 2 this winter. Ewww!! But now I’ve seen nearly everything I kinda wanted to see over Christmas but didn’t get around to:
Pride & Prejudice: pretty good; worth seeing for cheap; hated the final scene they wrote in.
Brokeback Mountain: I like it. And I think it’s really cool that they can make a tasteful movie about gay cowboys. Really cool.
The Producers: good funny! Though some scenes feel constrained, as though the blocking was pulled straight from the stage version and the camera angle is too narrow.
Good Night and Good Luck: I love black and white. Required viewing for anyone who thinks the Constitution is being trampled on. It doesn’t actively draw parallels between McCarthy and anything modern, but its very presence suggests them. Possibly just me. Also really neat to see the movie and then see a clip of the real 1950’s newscaster who is the main character of the film.

Those of you who remember a certain tenth grade English project may be amused to know that my Shakespeare class is doing something very similar! This time, though, we have to stick to the plot as given, though we may pull from multiple scene or overlay bits to make a point, provided that the point is substantiated by the text in the first place. My group is doing Richard III, a play I didn’t know much about until a few weeks ago. (However, now I can tell you if you don’t already know that the film of Richard III from about ten years ago starring Ian McKellen is phenomenal and you should all see it. So creepy!!) Anyway, I was experimenting with costume bits for this, and then I started playing with my camera and the mirror…ending up with this, which is kind of fun…
Odette casts magic missile.

Today was the official last day, though two of my classes finished yesterday. I had my English final on Monday (a sort of second midterm rather than a true final, really), and we generally got Wednesdays off in German, so she let us have this one too. So today was just the last day of HES. And there was much rejoicing.

I also had my voice jury this afternoon, so that’s another “final” down. I had to sing two pieces for the voice faculty (about six teachers): I got to choose the first, and they chose the second on the spot from a list of the songs I worked on this term. I picked a Mozart piece from Marriage of Figaro …which is kind of a story unto itself. See, the character who sings this aria is a page boy, but he’s always played by a woman for whatever reason. So among other things, I had to work on looking at least vaguely masculine, which was very interesting! Anyway, that went well, and then the faculty actually chose the song I was hoping they would! Of the other two, one I don’t know as well, and the other…well, apparently a lot of people are singing it this term, so they would be less likely to pick it for me. So all’s well. I get results on Friday, but I’m not concerned.

Work has been absolutely crazy of late - many projects due in the last few days! The best is when a whole class has to come down for something….and they all wait until the last minute! And then they’re upset when the equipment is booked by their classmates and we won’t stay late. Cry me a river, kiddos, you were told to start early. I have no sympathy. It’s crazy.

So now all I have to do is study for two exams and pack (my friends here hate me a little for that…can’t blame ‘em). I’ll probably put in some time at work during exams, too. Policy is that you don’t have to work your hours during exams, and whoever wants to can pick up extra. It’s usually quiet in there after classes end.

Not much longer now.