Black Swan: A Review Thursday, Dec 16 2010 

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PJ and I saw Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan, a psychological thriller about a ballerina and her rival, while we were in New York last week. Natalie Portman stars as Nina, the innocent ballerina who is in line to play the Swan Princess in Swan Lake. Her director, however, is skeptical that she has the sensuality to play the black swan. When he challenges her to get in touch with her less-than-perfect, sexy side, she begins a quest to achieve everything he wants her to be. Here’s the trailer:

Nina begins the film as a more or less virginal princess who, while technically perfect, never really achieves perfection in her dancing because she never embraces passion. Just as the previous prima donna, played by Winona Ryder, is being pushed out of the company and into retirement due to her age, a new, more sensual dancer, Lily, played by Mila Kunis, joins the company. She quickly becomes Nina’s rival for the part.

As a result of the competition, Nina soon becomes obsessed with Lily. What’s initially unclear is whether this obsession is the result of Lily’s desire to push Nina out of the way and take the role for herself or of Nina’s own fantasies. These fantasies revolve not only around dancing but also around her latent sexuality–while she has no chemistry with the male dancers, she’s clearly attracted to Lily, who seems more than willing to help Nina break out of her shell. But again, is she helping Nina or trying to destroy her?

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A Little Night Music: A Review Tuesday, Dec 14 2010 

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While we were in New York last week, PJ and I saw A  Little Night Music, starring Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch. We had never seen Peters or Stritch live before; we had also never seen a live performance of a Stephen Sondheim play. We had wanted to see this production last year, when Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury were starring in it. I’m glad we had to wait a year.

One of the things I love most about theater is when you experience a performance that’s truly amazing, one that transports you to someplace new and exciting, one that makes the hairs on your arms stand up. Bernadette Peters delivers such a performance in this show. She was amazing. Here’s a little taste of her version of “Send in the Clowns”:

In case you don’t know, A Little Night Music is about romantic intrigues among a group of Swedish couples around the turn of the twentieth century. Desiree is an aging actress with an illegitimate daughter who lives with Desiree’s mother, an elderly woman who lives with her memories of her own sordid liaisons. Desiree is beginning to feel that it’s time to leave the stage and settle down. She returns to her home town in the hopes that her daughter’s father, who was relatively recently widowed, will pick up where the two of them left off.

He wants to–after seeing her on stage, he wants to resume their previous affair, but he is now married to a much younger woman, putting an end to Desiree’s fantasy of settling down together. Or so it initially appears. Desiree soon learns that her former lover, Fredrik, and his young wife, Anna, have yet to consummate their marriage after six months, giving her hope that she will be able to seduce him away from Anna.

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Visiting New York Monday, Dec 13 2010 

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Yesterday, PJ and I got back from our annual trip to New York City. As usual, we had a great time, even though the trip was a little different than in the past.

This year I spent a significant part of the trip working rather than being a tourist. While PJ visited the sites (and caught up with an old friend), I met with a handful of my college’s alumni. Partly this was for development purposes, but it was also part of a larger effort to reconnect my college with its alumni. So, whenever I travel this year I’m trying to combine it with lunches, dinners, breakfasts, or coffees with alumni. Since I don’t actually have an official travel budget, I’m having to pay for some of the travel myself, which means that I’m trying to combine it with trips we already take or with places that I don’t mind going. Like New York!

The development stuff went well enough. You never know exactly how all that’s going to go in advance. I learned a lot of good stuff — not all of it pleasant — but all of it helpful in doing my job.

The only downside to the alumni meetings was that it left me little time for sightseeing. For the first time since we started visiting New York, I didn’t see any museums. But we did see some shows. We arrived in the city on Tuesday. That night we saw A Little Night Music with Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch. On Wednesday we didn’t see any shows; instead, PJ met up with a college friend and I met with an alum. On Thursday, we saw American Idiot. On Friday, we got tickets to La Bete, starring David Hyde Pierce, Joanna Lumley, and Mark Rylance. And on Saturday we saw Time Stands Still with Laura Linney. I’ll review each in more detail later.

We also ate incredibly well (as usual). We had more Italian this time than we usually do, but we also had Thai, Mexican, and Greek, and PJ had Vietnamese.

And finally, we saw Black Swan starring Natalie Portman, which I’ll review later.

So, all in all, it was a fun, successful trip. I just wish that I had made it to a museum or two. Next year, I’ll also try to consolidate my alumni visits into one or two days, giving myself more time to play.

 

Visiting Bruges Saturday, Dec 4 2010 

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As I wrote about yesterday, PJ and I were recently in Belgium. I had one day at the end of the trip to be just a tourist, so we took the train up to Bruges and spent most of a day walking around this historic city.

Bruges saw its heyday in the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods. By the fifteenth century it was one of the cultural centers for art in Europe. Amazingly, Bruges survived both world wars in tact, making it an almost pristine glimpse into the art and architecture of the early Renaissance.

Bruges is an incredibly beautiful city — it was cold but mostly clear while we visited. It must be heavenly in the summer! The architecture combined with the canals make it a uniquely beautiful place. Many of the streets are cobblestones, and the oldest houses and buildings are built so as to form continuous walls and fortifications. I could almost feel what it was like to have lived here hundreds of years ago. Cars and other signs of modernity seem so out of place in these streets.

After we left the train station, we made out way to the Market Square, which was being decorated for the holidays. After walking around it, we decided to climb the bell tower, which was built in 1300.

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Visiting Brussels Friday, Dec 3 2010 

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The week before Thanksgiving, PJ and I traveled to Brussels, Belgium. I was there for a symposium, and PJ came along to see a bit of a country we otherwise had no plans to visit any time soon. It was a nice little trip — we arrived in Brussels on Sunday morning and left bright and early on Thursday.

The weather when we arrived was wet and cold. We walked from the train station to our hotel, which had been arranged by the university hosting the symposium. The organizer had told me that the hotel was in the red light district, which immediately conjured up images from our trip to Amsterdam this past spring. Based on that PJ and I both thought that it would be fine. And it was, but it was also really weird — this was nothing like Amsterdam’s red light district. This area, which seemed to be centered on the block our hotel was on, had women (and a couple of guys) standing every 30 feet or so soliciting customers on the sidewalk. So, there was no way to get to and from our hotel without walking past several “working girls.”

The most awkward part for us was that we weren’t sure at first whether we should say hello as we passed by one of the women or if we should try to ignore her. We tried acknowledging them at first, but that seemed to be the start of a transaction that we were not interested in participating in. Other than that, though, is was fine — definitely something to remember!

My symposium, which was held on Monday and Tuesday, seemed to go really well. I really enjoyed meeting the other participants. And I’ll be getting an article written out of it. All that seems really good!

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SotW: Kiss Like Your Kiss by Lucinda Williams Thursday, Dec 2 2010 

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PJ and I love Lucinda Williams’s music, so I was delighted when I stumbled across a new song from her, “Kiss Like Your Kiss,” which features Elvis Costello:

This song is off the anthology album True Blood: Music from the Original HBO Series Vol. 2. I love the show, but I hadn’t paid attention to the album coming out — it’s been out since May. It also has songs by M.Ward, Jakob Dylan, Jace Everett, and Eels that I like.

“Kiss Like Your Kiss” is a beautiful love song, though it’s rather mournful and dark, as I suppose is appropriate for True Blood. It’s immediately become one of my favorite songs of the year!

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Death on the Nile (2004): A Review Sunday, Nov 28 2010 

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Yesterday, PJ and I went to Columbus to do a little sales shopping. Mostly, we bought clothes. PJ’s recently gotten back into reading Agatha Christie novels, and at some point while we were shopping he mentioned something about Hercule Poirot and Death on the Nile. This started us off on a quest to find a DVD of it.

Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, my family enjoyed watching the Joan Hickson Miss Marple series and then the David Suchet Hercule Poirot series. So, I was particularly desirous of finding the Suchet version of Death on the Nile, which I had never seen (at least that I can remember). While looking at Barnes and Nobles, we found a multi-disk collection of the episodes for about $100, which seemed like a lot more than we really wanted to pay. But then PJ pointed out that, if we were really going to watch all of the episodes, then it would be worth purchasing. So we did.

So, last night we watched Death on the Nile, which I thought was wonderful. Death takes place mostly on a cruise on the Nile. Simon Doyle and Linnet Ridgeway are celebrating their honeymoon. The couple would be perfectly happy if it weren’t for one little problem: Linnet’s former friend (and until quite recently Simon’s former fiancée) Jackie is hounding them in revenge for Linnet stealing her man. Every where they go, she pops up to torment the new couple. And her taunts and jeers seem to be getting increasingly irrational and potentially violent. Everything comes to a head when a murderer strikes during the cruise.

I had seen the 1978 movie version, which starred Peter Ustinov, Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Mia Farrow, Maggie Smith, and David Niven. Here’s a clip from that adaptation:

This version is rather campy and even comical, but it’s also fun and engaging.

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Jake & Eddie Friday, Nov 26 2010 

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This is Jake and Eddie. Jake is the little gray and white kitty; Eddie is the black one. They’re the newest editions to our family.

Even before Marlowe died, it was clear to me and PJ that Paisley doesn’t like to be alone. She’s a very sociable cat, and she likes feline companionship. While we were at the vet with Marlowe, we saw a little black female kitten, which PJ really took a shine to. He especially liked the potential symmetry of meeting a new cat as we said goodbye to our little boy.

We filled out the application to adopt her from our local humane society, but unfortunately she was adopted by someone else that same day. She has a little brother, who is also black, so we decided that we would adopt him instead. PJ really wanted a black cat.

We were then told by the humane society that it could take up to two weeks to adopt him, which made no sense to me at all. The woman who was fostering him also thought that it sounded unreasonable. We decided not to wait. On the one hand,we were missing Marlowe terribly and needed something to help ease the pain. On the other hand, Paisley was also acting severely lonely. What especially got me was when she would go out onto the back deck and sit in her usual spot, where she’s wait for him to come up the back steps. She was clearly waiting, and Marlowe wasn’t ever going to come up the stairs again. So, PJ and I decided that we needed to get another cat as quickly as possible — for our sakes, if not for hers.

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Happy Thanksgiving Thursday, Nov 25 2010 

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PJ made this delicious pie totally from scratch to take with us to Thanksgiving dinner, which we had with our friends Rick and Nicole and their friends. This was our first attempt at making pie crust, which came out wonderfully! He wanted it to look rustic, and the crust thin and delicate. I think we probably should have cooked it about 10-20 minutes longer, but it tasted delicious, and now we know how to make crust.

Having Thanksgiving with people we barely knew turned out to be more fun than I had expected. The other three couples all have children the same age, which is how they all know each other. Dinner was delicious, and the three courses of wines were an education in and of themselves. And having three six-year-olds and two babies around reminded me how lucky we gays are that we don’t have to worry about pregnancy or raising children unless we really want to!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

 

Theater of War: A Review Monday, Nov 1 2010 

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Recently PJ and I watched a documentary titled Theater of War, which is about The Public Theater’s 2006 production of Mother Courage and Her Children starring Meryl Streep. The stage production was directed by George C. Wolfe and was newly translated into English by Tony Kushner.

Here’s a clip about the production that I found on YouTube:

We had just received our Netflix for Wii and wanted to watch something just to try it out. Of course anything starring Streep was going to catch our eye, and we both love the theater and Bertolt Brecht’s work in particular. Theater of War turns out to be an excellent and engrossing documentary that covers a lot more than just this one production.

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