strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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May 17 03: 48 hours
Well, another week goes by. It started well enough: I appear to finally be finding a way back into the universe, back from wherever it is I went after we came back from England. One of those places where nothing happens for a long time and you don’t know what to do about it. Call it Gaffa. Thank you to those who.
But! The last 48 hours! Have been great! They have included:
- X2 Saw it with Pablo last night. It was a date. We had much much fun. I think I’m going to see it again with John tomorrow night, actually. That, of course, will not be a date.
- Avery came home from the hospital today. Yay!
- Matrix Reloaded This was also a good time. It lacked the mindbending newness of the first—but then, how could it not? This one often felt like the first one, only turned up to 11. 12, maybe even. And yes, there are a number of things to gripe about (like Morpheus’ utterly-beyond-turgid dialogue, or the way the Merovingian’s uneven acting often made him seem as though he’d wandered in from Mel Brooks’ parody version of Matrix Reloaded). X2 was a better film. But despite it all I had fun. I’m sorry Paul wasn’t with us.
- Here’s what Merovingian means, by the way. Short answer: refers to a Frankish dynasty of the 5th-8th centuries. I knew it had to mean something.
- Dinner with Erika, Sari, and John after tonight’s movie. I’d missed them, having been out of the universe for a while.
Anyway, that’s my news. How’s things with you?
May 9 03: buffa: boffo!
Really nice review of the Barber of Seville in today’s New York Times. (As with all the other links I’ve posted to the Times, you’ll need to register to read the article. It’s free, though. I don’t think you even have to register using any sort of actual identifying information. Which makes you wonder what the point of the registration is in the first place. But I digress.) For those of you (like, oh, say, Paul, or my beloved cousin Erika, or Sari) who wanted to see the show but can’t, because it’s now well and truly sold out, this is something.
May 6 03: gasp!
Okay, I guess our England vacation (sorry, holiday) wasn’t as utterly perfect as we thought it was. If it had been, it would have included a sighting of The Brown Mask. Granted, we were nowhere near Tunbridge Wells, but still…with luck, he’ll still be in action on our next visit.
May 5 03: big giant head
I’m now halfway through the run of the all-puppet Barber of Seville at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Well, it’s obviously not an exclusively-puppets production; somebody has to do the singing and the bassoon playing and such. I’m singing in the eight-man chorus with a bunch of other Juilliard Choral Union folks. The production is deeply wacky and much fun and kind of makes me want to run off and join the circus. Rumor has it we’re about to be reviewed by the Times. NPR did a story about us the other morning, too. Man, I am like sooooo cutting-edge.
kaiju
I mentioned it briefly, but let me reiterate: the Kaiju Big Battel show was some seriously weird stuff. And I’m not just saying that because I went there on the same day we came home from England and thus was seriously jet-lagged.
It delivered exactly what it promised: a bizarre amalgamation of the WWE and Ultraman. People in big rubber suits duked it out in a steel cage filled with little cardboard skyscrapers. The bad guys cheated outrageously and always got away with it: this was a night where evil ended up triumphant. (Poor Silver Potato! He got the snot kicked out of him by, like, seven different monsters at once in the final belt match.) The announcer screamed himself hoarse over the course of the evening—he had to provide a complete running commentary by himself, because none of the combatants could talk from inside their rubber heads. The cage had been constructed in the middle of Roseland’s dance floor: the combatants entered via the stage and walked down a gangplank to take their turns. Video monitors provided periodic interludes of “news,” generally pertaining to a sudden and mysterious crime spree by the beloved freedom-fighting duo Los Plantanos. (Yes, they were bananas. It turned out that the Plantanoses had been captured and replaced by their evil twins. There was a gigantic tag-team grudge match when the plot was revealed. The evil twins, for reasons unclear, had ‘CIA’ stencilled across their yellow skins.) The violence was simulated in the time-honored pro-wrestling tradition: lots of foot-stomping and judo throws. A couple of dive-from-the-top-of-the-cage moments, though, which are always impressive.
The Trachtenbergs were, um, fascinating. Dad Trachtenberg seemed pretty manic, but I guess that’s the way it has to be if you’re being upstaged by your nine-year-old daughter. Sadly, they were crammed off into one corner of the stage for their set, and their slideshow was not duplicated on the big video monitors. So most people kind of missed out on the totality of the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players experience.
lie back
Right. So. England. Excellent. Easily among the best vacations (sorry, holidays) that Paul and I have ever taken. First we spent a few days in Oxford at Robin and Peter’s house. Then the four of us rented a self-catering cottage in Porlock, which is on the Bristol Channel in the southwest of England, between Exmoor and the sea. Highlights included:
- Long walks through green fields
- Lovely old churches
- Quaint villages
- Narrow twisty country lanes (“This is an A road?”) bordered by high and ancient hedgerows
- Spring lambs
- Excellent Indian dinners
- Paul’s quest for the Perfect Hat, which ended well and provided the rest of us with rich opportunities for mockery along the way
- Vast quantities of Earl Grey
- Wells Cathedral and its astonishing scissor arches. Built only a century after the cathedral was consecrated, they have a clean, modern look. Cooool.
- Mmmmm….cider…getting a pint of cider at the pub is a lovely thing. Be really really careful. Man. Now I want a pint of cider.
- Gorse!
- Peter teaching me how to approach British-style cryptic crosswords. Like cider, these may cause the heads of the uninitiated to spin and/or explode.
- Hey, they’re serving wild boar!
- Paul driving on the left side of the road (I kept meaning to take a turn at the wheel, but it never happened)
- Gin and tonics with lemon! Shocking! But not unpleasant.
May 4 03: aed
Sure sure, there are other things to discuss. But! Here’s the best bit of news: on Wednesday I became an uncle. Please join me in welcoming Avery Elizabeth Drew to the world. Avery was born on April 30, six-and-a-half weeks early, which meant that there were a few potential health issues, but she avoided many of them altogether and is overcoming the rest of them like a champ. I got to see her yesterday, all 4 pounds of her, and she’s beautiful. Her mom and dad are also doing swimmingly, although Jason now has to advance the timetable on his Baby Room Storage Redesign Project considerably. He has somewhere between a week and three weeks before she gets home from University Hospital in Stony Brook.
The photo at right is what she looked liked yesterday. You can see traces of an intense blue light coming out from beneath her blanket: she is not some kind of junior X-girl (although yes, that would have been cool). She’s actually lying on a light-up pad-thingy. It’s to help her get over some mild jaundice—more of a tan, really—which is one of the health issues I mentioned. As a result, she spends lots of time with a little sleep mask over her eyes. You can see the adhesive velcro pads used for this purpose on her temples. The nose tube is for feeding: that’s the other thing she’s still learning how to do. Her lungs work just fine, though, which was a big worry.
I regret that the photo doesn’t give you an indication of scale. Her head is about the size of a fist. That’s also the Joy of Cooking guideline for a ‘medium-sized onion,’ now that I think of it. Medium-sized onions, however, don’t have such exquisite little pointy chins.
Finally, for those of you into such arcana, here is Avery’s natal chart. Anybody who wants to tell us what it means is invited to do so.