Through a Rotoscope, Darkly
Jul. 16th, 2006 07:17 pm( Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get you )
On Sunday, I had the pleasure of seeing a whole bunch of people I just never get enough of: First off, sarrabellum and
sleepwhenimdead whisked me off to the East Side for their son Haven's birthday fete. At some unnamed East Side mall (I'm still completely lost over there; I never get out of the city ...), we met up with
ketina and
ronelyn ,
pinky_ki , and
ladyavalon42 and
differedrom (and the latter couple's brood of excitable young'uns) to see the new Harry Potter movie.
( Harry Potter and the Goblins of Puberty )
( The Party )
Alas, I had to duck out of the party early in order to meet another group of friends, these from last year's Spanish class, for dinner at Cedar's and a Flamenco show at the U, that evening. ( La cena y el flamenco )
Last night, a coworker and I tried out Seattle's newer Moroccan restaurant, Mamounia, which just happens to be in Cap Hill (my neighborhood). ( Mmmm ... Moroccan food ... )
( Doin' the funky Sheikh ... )
Afterward, I took a walk through Cal Anderson Park (what we in the neighborhood like to call "Teletubbyland"), where I watched some guys (mostly bike messengers, it turned out) play bike polo--which, frankly, I'd never even heard of, before--on the soccer field, under a bright full moon. Meanwhile, I listened to a couple of fellow spectators arguing (hopelessly, pointlessly) about whether there's a God or not ...
I know a lot of people on my flist got into Firefly a long time ago, and have been eagerly anticipating the premiere of Serenity for eons. My situation is a little different: I actually saw the entire Firefly series (thanks, verbicide!) and the movie during the past three weeks.
( If any of you actually still haven't seen Serenity, yet, beware of spoilers ... )
Enter your LJ user name, and 10 interests will be selected from your interest list.
Last Thursday, I went to listen to Salman Rushdie read from his newest novel, Shalimar the Clown. I've been reading Rushdie since college, and I've thought very highly of previous efforts such as Midnight's Children, The Jaguar Smile, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor's Last Sigh; I've been less impressed with a few books, such as Shame and Fury.
To judge by the passages we heard, Shalimar the Clown is in many ways quite typical of Rushdie's writing: a tragic story wrapped in gallows humor; varied, lively settings--in this case ranging from German-occupied France in the 1940s to Kashmir in the 1960s to contemporary Los Angeles; and the prose is standard Rushdie, as well--breathless, colloquial, digressive.
Shalimar does sound like a particularly promising Rushdie novel, though, if for no other reason because the author seems so invested in the subject matter: the story is rooted in the struggle over Kashmir and in "the psychology of fanaticism"--subjects which Rushdie, as he ruefully noted, "knows something about": his family is of Kashmiri extraction and he has very strong feelings about what's happened to the place in the half-century since partition; and, of course, there was that fatwa calling for Rushdie's assassination (the fatwa was later rescinded--hence Rushdie's current freedom to fly around the world flogging new books). I'll let you know what else I think about the novel after I've finished reading it ...
( And then, there were the obligatory, cringe-worthy audience questions ... )
(Next post: I hike Mt Rainier!)
FYI, for those of you living in the Seattle area: The Big Picture will be putting on benefit showings of the '80s New Orleans crime drama The Big Easy, this coming week; all ticket and bar receipts will go to the American Red Cross for Hurricane Katrina relief. The Seattle theater will show it at 8:30 on Wednesday September 7 and the Redmond theater will show it on Thursday the 8th at 8:30.
I think I had a few too many ambitions for this weekend--I spent too much time running around, not enough enjoying any one of the things that I set out to do:
On Saturday, I did manage to put in an all-too-brief appearance at sarrabellum 's birthday celebration, where of course I got to see
sleepwhenimdead , Haven, and a whole lot of mutual friends and acquaintances who, always last to learn, I discovered were on LJ--like
ketina,
ronelyn,
differedfrom,
ladyavalon42,
pinky_ki, and
spoomeister. OK, OK, I knew about the latter two, already--but it was amusing to find myself at a party full of people I already knew to one degree or another and only then discover that most of them were on here, too. Still sorry I missed out on the cake.
Today's featured Wikipedia article is on Spring-Heeled Jack, a Victorian urban legend bearing a suspicious resemblance to several 20th-century comic book characters (black cape, metal claws, pointy ears, glowing eyes, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, a big letter on his chest, etc.). Jack sounds for all the world like a circus acrobat gone bad, doesn't he?
The story would have the makings of an excellent Tim Burton picture ... that is, if Burton hadn't already visited so many similar images and notions in films like Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ...