General update
Oct. 16th, 2007 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fr_defenestratoLife has been hovering between yeah-ok and splendid. Over the last week I've done some serious hanging-out with my friend and co-Cheese Lord Nathan: following last Wednesday's dress rehearsal for Saturday's concert we went to Green Lantern and hung out till last call at the downstairs bar, drinking beer and a couple tequila shots and exchanging stories of our love- and sex lives past. He is currently looking for work, so I promised to hook him up with Jaeger, my friend and erstwhile protégé who still works for PSA supporting peer review meetings. It seems to me Nathan would be great as a writer-recorder, as his emails are always pristine, his resume looks good (not heavily editorial, though), and his style/usage prefs are decisive and consistent.
Friday he emailed me asking whether I wanted to buy a set of three high-end speakers and the amp that drives them (which I had indeed wanted to buy from a third Cheese Lord some months ago, but Nathan had got there first); he said he needed some cash and hardly used the system anyway; I brought him cash after work and he and I wheeled the speakers and amp up 13th St. in our matching shopping carts; after which we went to dinner at The Heights, the newish joint at Kenyon and 14th and a sibling to several other established D.C. eateries (Logan Tavern, etc.). The flash-fried ginger calamari is the same recipe from Logan, and it consistently rocks my world. And the mustard-encrustard tuna (basically so rare as to be big hunks o'sashimi) was wonderful.
Set up the speakers and amp (going to Craigslist my old amp; nothing at all wrong with it, but the new one's a serious upgrade in terms of power and flexibility)... anyone interested in a pretty basic Pioneer amp? I'll send specs. I kept and will keep the old speakers, buy more good-grade speaker wire, and run it to the very back of my living room to do a 5-speaker surround setup for the next Movie Marathon. Should be awesome.
Saturday I woke up late and spent hours writing thorough arguments on religious differences and bigotry on a friend's LJ. Then showered, dressed in black, and headed downtown for the concert. St. Matt's cathedral is a beautiful, acoustically WOW space (sitting in the back is utterly pointless for music listening, but up close it's great)... the Cheese Lords could actually hear each other very well as we were singing, so we had decided in advance to sing almost everything mixed—a totally new approach for the group... we've always been kinda terrified to be apart from our fellow tenors or baritones or whatever. The concert went very well; the one track I've heard from the recording (we use a professional recordist for most of our gigs) sounded fabulous, but it's also among the pieces we know the best. After the concert was the ritual depantsing (so dubbed by a sorta groupie of ours)... since the Costume Committee recently bought the group's first-ever complete Cheese Lord outfit—black slacks, "chianti" dress shirt (which weren't ready for this show), black belt, black socks, black shoes—and since a central laundry function is the only way to ensure (a) shirts fade and clothes wear uniformly and (b) everybody has their uniform at every gig, we all had to change into different pants, write our name inside the waistband in silver marker, and hand them over to our resident costumers. Thus becasualled, most of the lords and some friends headed to Bertucci's for pizza and beer.
Sunday was a home day. Some cleaning, including the first stage of remedying the truly awful disaster of a gallon or so of laundry detergent that leaked all over the floor of my bathroom closet (theory: mousetrap sprung, hit and punctured side of container): I hauled everything out, washed off the save-stuff in the tub, threw out cardboard boxes and started finding home for misplaced contents (I need a new tookbox)... all that's left is the repulsive and probably endless job of getting all the actual detergent off the floor (it'll suds forever, I know).
Also finally took down from the hallway wall the wheel of fortune![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
maestro_live constructed 4 years ago for the "gambling/Vegas" marathon (it hadn't actually spun reliably in years), and put up my old hat- and coat-rack in its place; and did sewing repairs to am ailing quilt that Maestro gave me months ago.
Through all of which I watched Adam & Steve, When Do We Eat?, and the miniseries and most of Season 1 of the newfangledBattlestar Galactica. I liked the two movies despite their both being rather singleminded and manipulative (hell, in A&S, thanks to the 10-minute first sequence, the audience knows for three quarters of the movie what the two main romantic characters do not: that they had met 17 years earlier in an encounter that was rather traumatic for both... if that's not manipulation, I dunno what is).
For all its attempts at being wild and crazy (as Nathan Rabin at the Onion A.V. Club asks, "how many stoner Passover comedies prominently featuring a deathly Jack Klugman are there?"), WDWE is a wholly expected tale of an ornately broken family at a Seder who need to be pulled together by movie's end despite infidelities, much interpersonal rancor, the newfound Hasidism of one son, the recreational drug use of another, the autism of a third, the sex-worker career of a daughter... golly, I'm nowhere near done but am tired of listing obstacles. The movie mostly works because the cast, including Michael Lerner and Leslie Ann Warren as the mom and dad and Jack Klugman as Lerner's pop, are pretty much excellent all around, and because the director, to bring life to the patriarch's "extasy trip" when his stoner son drugs him, waxes cinematically rhapsodic over a 1936 edition of the Hagaddah by Artur Szyk, incorporating elements, colors, and themes from this gorgeously illustrated book. What doesn't really work is that any of the stereotypical characters—not even the tripping, touchy-feely Lerner character, much less his non-drug-mollified family—could even find their way from hating to huggy in an evening, much less set up some kind of semi-permanent camp there.
Galactica rocks. I'm really enjoying the places where this show has gone so far. I was not a fan of the original series (frankly, I think Mel Blanc's "biggie-biggie-biggie" robot vocalization made it singularly unwatchable), so I don't even know firsthand how differently (other than changing the characters' sex) this series construes the personality and psychology of Starbuck and Boomer, or how Edward James Almost's Adama compares and contrasts with Ol' Pop Cartwright's. But I adore both Olmos's Adama and Mary McDonnell's President Roslin (I am deeply in love with this woman, have been ever since she played Donnie Darko's mom... is that weird?) Alas, the producers seem most in love with their Dr. Gaius Baltar (James Callis), a semi-villain whom I find every bit as please-let-me-smack-him annoying as "Lost in Space"'s Dr. Smith at his snivelliest.
Friday he emailed me asking whether I wanted to buy a set of three high-end speakers and the amp that drives them (which I had indeed wanted to buy from a third Cheese Lord some months ago, but Nathan had got there first); he said he needed some cash and hardly used the system anyway; I brought him cash after work and he and I wheeled the speakers and amp up 13th St. in our matching shopping carts; after which we went to dinner at The Heights, the newish joint at Kenyon and 14th and a sibling to several other established D.C. eateries (Logan Tavern, etc.). The flash-fried ginger calamari is the same recipe from Logan, and it consistently rocks my world. And the mustard-encrustard tuna (basically so rare as to be big hunks o'sashimi) was wonderful.
Set up the speakers and amp (going to Craigslist my old amp; nothing at all wrong with it, but the new one's a serious upgrade in terms of power and flexibility)... anyone interested in a pretty basic Pioneer amp? I'll send specs. I kept and will keep the old speakers, buy more good-grade speaker wire, and run it to the very back of my living room to do a 5-speaker surround setup for the next Movie Marathon. Should be awesome.
Saturday I woke up late and spent hours writing thorough arguments on religious differences and bigotry on a friend's LJ. Then showered, dressed in black, and headed downtown for the concert. St. Matt's cathedral is a beautiful, acoustically WOW space (sitting in the back is utterly pointless for music listening, but up close it's great)... the Cheese Lords could actually hear each other very well as we were singing, so we had decided in advance to sing almost everything mixed—a totally new approach for the group... we've always been kinda terrified to be apart from our fellow tenors or baritones or whatever. The concert went very well; the one track I've heard from the recording (we use a professional recordist for most of our gigs) sounded fabulous, but it's also among the pieces we know the best. After the concert was the ritual depantsing (so dubbed by a sorta groupie of ours)... since the Costume Committee recently bought the group's first-ever complete Cheese Lord outfit—black slacks, "chianti" dress shirt (which weren't ready for this show), black belt, black socks, black shoes—and since a central laundry function is the only way to ensure (a) shirts fade and clothes wear uniformly and (b) everybody has their uniform at every gig, we all had to change into different pants, write our name inside the waistband in silver marker, and hand them over to our resident costumers. Thus becasualled, most of the lords and some friends headed to Bertucci's for pizza and beer.
Sunday was a home day. Some cleaning, including the first stage of remedying the truly awful disaster of a gallon or so of laundry detergent that leaked all over the floor of my bathroom closet (theory: mousetrap sprung, hit and punctured side of container): I hauled everything out, washed off the save-stuff in the tub, threw out cardboard boxes and started finding home for misplaced contents (I need a new tookbox)... all that's left is the repulsive and probably endless job of getting all the actual detergent off the floor (it'll suds forever, I know).
Also finally took down from the hallway wall the wheel of fortune
maestro_live constructed 4 years ago for the "gambling/Vegas" marathon (it hadn't actually spun reliably in years), and put up my old hat- and coat-rack in its place; and did sewing repairs to am ailing quilt that Maestro gave me months ago.Through all of which I watched Adam & Steve, When Do We Eat?, and the miniseries and most of Season 1 of the newfangledBattlestar Galactica. I liked the two movies despite their both being rather singleminded and manipulative (hell, in A&S, thanks to the 10-minute first sequence, the audience knows for three quarters of the movie what the two main romantic characters do not: that they had met 17 years earlier in an encounter that was rather traumatic for both... if that's not manipulation, I dunno what is).
For all its attempts at being wild and crazy (as Nathan Rabin at the Onion A.V. Club asks, "how many stoner Passover comedies prominently featuring a deathly Jack Klugman are there?"), WDWE is a wholly expected tale of an ornately broken family at a Seder who need to be pulled together by movie's end despite infidelities, much interpersonal rancor, the newfound Hasidism of one son, the recreational drug use of another, the autism of a third, the sex-worker career of a daughter... golly, I'm nowhere near done but am tired of listing obstacles. The movie mostly works because the cast, including Michael Lerner and Leslie Ann Warren as the mom and dad and Jack Klugman as Lerner's pop, are pretty much excellent all around, and because the director, to bring life to the patriarch's "extasy trip" when his stoner son drugs him, waxes cinematically rhapsodic over a 1936 edition of the Hagaddah by Artur Szyk, incorporating elements, colors, and themes from this gorgeously illustrated book. What doesn't really work is that any of the stereotypical characters—not even the tripping, touchy-feely Lerner character, much less his non-drug-mollified family—could even find their way from hating to huggy in an evening, much less set up some kind of semi-permanent camp there.
Galactica rocks. I'm really enjoying the places where this show has gone so far. I was not a fan of the original series (frankly, I think Mel Blanc's "biggie-biggie-biggie" robot vocalization made it singularly unwatchable), so I don't even know firsthand how differently (other than changing the characters' sex) this series construes the personality and psychology of Starbuck and Boomer, or how Edward James Almost's Adama compares and contrasts with Ol' Pop Cartwright's. But I adore both Olmos's Adama and Mary McDonnell's President Roslin (I am deeply in love with this woman, have been ever since she played Donnie Darko's mom... is that weird?) Alas, the producers seem most in love with their Dr. Gaius Baltar (James Callis), a semi-villain whom I find every bit as please-let-me-smack-him annoying as "Lost in Space"'s Dr. Smith at his snivelliest.
