Honestly this movie was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Even suspenseful at times, at least to a scaredy cat like me. I’ve definitely seen worse!! Plus it’s total eye candy: Paul Walker = hot. Jessica Alba = hot. All swimsuits and open seas. What’s not to like?
Ah, for the salad days of living in flipflops, board shorts and tees. Someone find me a sugar daddy, pronto! I’m living the wrong life!
Went up to Old Town to hear one of Amanda’s favorite bands Crooked Still. Rachael, I think you would really love this band! They play old American folk standards (all about bandits and hooligans and whores and murder and mayhem), with a combination of blues-y, rock, bluegrass styles. Cello, double-bass, banjo and vocalist. Very sparse arrangements yet they just fill up the place with sound. Really intriguing. Rockin’ out.
Followed by Karan Casey, an Irish vocalist, who plays a mix of traditional and new. Fuller accompaniments. Very full strong soprano. Some real heartbreakers. Quite lovely. Bonus, her pianist was a) totally hot and b) a great pianist. His little solo set in the middle of the show: the “jig” was amazing!
My parents gave me this for Christmas (along with this) both selections from The Rue Morgue Press, a small publishing house in Colorado that’s reprinting old mysteries from the 30s and 40s. (I’ve now got an entire list I need to order!!)
A completely ditzy-blonde society deb-type marries a vicar, moves to his small-town, and finds herself embroiled in mystery when his curate is murdered on Christmas Eve. There’s illegitimate children and blackmail and poison and a secret service agent…and so much more.
Quick easy read. Lots of fun! If you like old mysteries (Agatha Christie?) or new mysteries written like those of old (Jacqueline Winspear or the Laurie King Russell/Holmes series) then you need to check out the offerings from The Rue Morgue!!
Bedford wrote one of my very, very favorite books “The Houdini Girl” which for a long time I thought was his only book; as it turns out, he’s very hard to find in the US and in fact I bought this one in the UK.
Mysterious and spooky. A “dowser” (which I would have called a “diviner” but not sure if that’s a UK vs. US thing or just a “depends where you heard about it” thing). A myth hunter. A climber. A reporter. A strange quest. A connection made, and then broken.
Really entrancing and beautiful. Some brutal bits. Lovely.
The German flick that won the foreign language Oscar.
Really, really good. About secrets and trust, and oppression and cohersion. About a sad lonely man who finds himself making unexpected decisions. About figuring out the game. When is one a pawn, and when is one the chess player?
Sad. And bleak, that deep grey institutional graffiti-ed bleakness that you may recall from old books or films you haven’t seen in a long time about that particular point in German/world history…
As my dad says frequently, “I miss the Cold War.”
…the Weapon of Silence:
It has been said that silence is a powerful weapon; in a quite different sense it has a terrible power when wielded by those who are loved. It increases the anxiety of the one who waits. Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart, and what greater barrier is there than silence? It has been said too that silence is torture, capable of driving the man condemned to it in a prison cell to madness. But what even greater torture it is, greater than having to keep silent, to endure the silence of the person one loves!
…Physical Illness:
It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us, with no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Were we to meet a brigand on the road, we might manage to make him conscious of his own personal interest if not of our plight. But to ask pity of our body is like talking to an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the sea, and with which we should be terrified to find ourselves condemned to live.
–from “The Guermantes Way” as translated by Mark Treharne in the new Penguin edition
Finally finished this, after (supposedly) slogging through it all of February. Probably my slowest reading month in years, but I just had a lot going on, wasn’t on the El very much (my prime reading time!!), and didn’t ever get the energy to pick anything else up so if I wasn’t in the mood for this, then I just didn’t read.
I liked that in this book Marcel stays an identifiable (and seemingly) same age the whole book (vs. book 2 when sometimes the narrative tone seemed to change ages/decades intermittently). He drives you nuts though (in every book) with his obsessions. He’s so consumed with people that he doesn’t even really like but yet is completely attracted to/consumed by. So focused on those slightly above him in society. Trying to find meaning in their (in reality meaningless) aristocratic mannerisms and customs. Finding fault while at the same time trying to emulate.
I’ve said similar things before — so yes I’m repeating myself — but I continue to think the reason these books have maintained their high profile for so many years is because Marcel represents that worst part of all of us. The neurotic, obsessive, self destructive part of us that we don’t show very many people, if any. Yet reading about it is quite fascinating.