Creating something every day for 365 days
With A Christmas Carol and the Tour of Homes in the books (albeit with one more weekend of CC performances to go), it’s time to excavate the study.
That may not look so bad to you, but trust me—it’s a mess: the detritus of three months of shedding as I move from one project to another. It will be therapeutic to get everything tidied up/stored/tossed.
And then it’s on to… TBD.
updated:
Et voilá!
Notice not only the clear floor and desks, but the addition of the Assistive Feline™.
In her Washington Post op-ed on Friday, Ruth Marcus bemoaned our post-truth PPE. She’s on point with her facts and her opinions, but on one item she completely missed the boat.
Ironically, while gigging the PPE for “not quite understanding what euphemism means,” she bends over backwards dancing around the hard truth[1]: “consistently heedless to truth”; “untrue assertion”; “untruths”; “chock-full-of-lies”; “truth-impaired”; “unconstrained by facts.” Only in her last paragraph does she nail it: “The journalist’s challenge is not to tire in refuting the torrent of lies.”
The way to do that, Ms. Marcus, is to use the exact terminology each and every time: the PPE won by lying. He continues to lie. He is a liar.
—————
[1] See what I did there?
[Here be Spoiler Alerts.]
We went to see Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, because Harry Potter. It’s a dazzling movie, to be sure, and the performances are all spot-on, with the four main characters especially charming and adorable.
But…
We left feeling very unsatisfied. The plotting is haphazard and whatever suspense there might be in figuring out what’s going on is dissipated by the most telegraphing since the Titanic went down. It relied a lot on fan service, i.e., our prior knowledge of the Potterverse, to keep us on board, and the middle third especially just dragged.
We were appalled at the loose threads in the plot. What exactly did the newspaper publisher/senator story have to do with anything? Was it simply for the Citizen Kane shot being destroyed by the Obscurus? Not enough. I got the feeling there was a lot left on the cutting room floor, because the paltry conflict within that plotline was never integrated at all with the main plot. J. Jonah Jameson, Jon Voight was not.
The conflict that seemed to be driving the American wizards (remaining hidden from Non-Maj society, etc.) was never fleshed out, and the “villainous” Mary Lou who rants on the steps of the bank about the danger of witches among us never seemed more than your usual NYC crackpot. The idea that she posed a credible threat to the magical community was dumb—her headquarters was a rundown hellhole, while MACUSA occupied a luxurious Art Deco skyscraper.
And what was the deal with Scamander’s relationship with the Lestrange girl back at Hogwarts? We may never know. We certainly don’t know what it had to do with the current movie, other than to allow Scamander to display some empathy with poor Credence Barebone, whose relationship with Tina Goldstein is likewise never fully explained. (There is an explanation, kind of, but like everything else in the movie it’s compressed and rushed.)
The final reveal, that Graves is actually Grindlewald, raises more questions than it solves: Graves is head of the Aurors at MACUSA—how long has Grindlewald been disguised in order to ascend to that position?? I don’t think it’s justifiable that eventually the good Potterian will think, “Ah, it must have been Polyjuice Potion,” even though we never see any evidence of that.
(I just went to the Wikipedia article on the film in order to remember the term “Obscurus,” and was shocked to find in the synopsis details that were not at all clear in the movie. There are also details which apparently the author of the Wikipedia article got from the film which I think are wrong. Sloppy, and I’m talking about the filmmakers.)
The fantastic beasts were fantastic, but again, they felt glued onto the plot. They were mostly deployed for slapstick interludes, and we never got to be familiar with any of them except for the Niffler and the Bowtruckle (who smacked of Baby Groot, alas).
After we got home, we kept gnawing on the sources of our discontent, as one does, when it finally dawned on us: the problem was not so much with the movie itself as it was that it shouldn’t have been the first Newt Scamander movie. This was the second Fantastic Beasts film. The first film introduced us to Newt Scamander as he scours the earth for these creatures, along with flashbacks to his problems at Hogwarts leading to his expulsion, culminating in the rescue of the… whatever the big bird thing was in the second movie… a Thunderbird, maybe?… in Egypt. This propels us into the second film, as Scamander comes to America to release the Thunderbird into its native habitat in Arizona (mentioned briefly in the film), and gives more breathing space for actual plot.
Somebody really should be paying me big bucks to do this thinking for them. Jo?
Don’t worry, this is not a liberal rant.
YOU MAY THINK THOSE LITTLE SQUIRRELS ARE CUTE, WITH THEIR LITTLE FLUFFY TAILS AND THEIR DARLING FACES, KENNETH, BUT YOU ARE WRONG WRONG WRONG THEY ARE THE DEMON SPAWN OF BEELZEBUB HIMSELF.
This is what the new grass in the labyrinth looks like:
Dozens of little potholes:
MAY THEY ROAST IN HELL.
Thank you for listening.
Today we did something fun. My lovely first wife had inherited an original engraving of one of her ancestresses:
…and wanted it hung in the more Victorian of the two guestrooms.
Here’s the fun part: the frame had an old, handmade brass loop, like so…
…which mean that whatever it was hanging from would be visible.
Fortunately—and I didn’t know this until today—there is such a thing as a Victorian picture nail. You can see some lovely examples here. Upon seeing them, the LFW asked if we might not make our own. “Use what we have,” is our new motto, and boy, some of you are getting some pretty bizarre objects as gifts for the next decade.
Anyway, I conceived a plan.
First, decide where to put the hanger on the wall. Easy, just hold the painting up to the wall and put a dot where the loop is.
Except the loop didn’t stand up by itself, preferring to slip down behind the painting.
And so…
Loop stabilized, dot made on the wall, and…
That’s right, a plain flat-head screw. Now all we needed was something appropriate…
…like a handpainted Czechoslovakian ceramic brooch.
The reverse:
Hang the etching on the screw. Heat up the hotglue gun, put a dab on the screw, and…
Tada!
Frippery upon frippery, eh wot?
1:32 p.m.:
I’ve been working all morning, just futzing around with some sounds for the opening of SUN TRUE FIRE. Think the opening to Das Rheingold, or to Kevin Puts’ Symphony No. 2. Slow, low strings, building to some kind of crescendo…
I want to structure the entire work around the idea of a ritual: INVOCATION/CALL — AGONS (QUESTIONS, ENCOUNTERS, PROPHECIES) — REVELATION — RESOLUTION. The opening needs to introduce us to the mystical landscape we’re about to enter, and then we will have some great pillars of sound, with a solo tenor calling us: “drunk among them, lead the way a clear voice way…”
Of what I’ve written today, here’s what’s worth sharing: STF opening abortive attempt
(I think it’s nice, and I think it would come after a longer buildup before this point. It may go different paths than what I’ve indicated here.)
9:30 a.m.
I’ve rewritten the Chorale from the Christmas Carol “Christmas Present Street Scene.” Its weirdo chromaticism wasn’t ever really a problem, but the ending was always dicey since the sopranos had to sing high and divisi.
This rewrite had to begin with the same melodic phrase, which reappears before “Hey, boy, what day is today?” in the Finale and which was not problematic anyway. In general, I’ve kept the first parts of the two verses the same, just monkeying with the endings so that they don’t climb too high for inexperienced singers.
So the Abortive Attempt is done. I’ll set it aside and let it annoy me again later.
Oh, you’d like to hear it? Here.
11:36 a.m.
SUN TRUE FIRE. hoo boy.
Lots of scribbled notes—on paper even! Just chords, bass lines, interesting combinations. Nothing serious yet. No real text set, although I think I’m zeroing in on verse IX. Big Case as my first target.
However, here’s a lovely little bit, almost an Easier Piece in its simplicity. It may end up in XI. The Azure Stone (Resolution). Listen.
1:33 p.m.:
Here’s a cute little two-part waltz. I truly am just plopping out random notes without worrying about whether they’re ever going to wind up being usable in SUN TRUE FIRE.
3:05 p.m.:
Lots of little bits, nothing more to share.
It’s time to hit the hot tub for a bit.
More spam email subject lines:
Time once again to flush the old spam filter…
(All capitalization and punctuation exactly as in the original.)
And with that, I’m out.
——
Not quite. I couldn’t resist taking a peek inside that last one.
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That’s poetry. But I’m already years behind on my SUN TRUE FIRE project, so I will resist the urge to turn that into something.
But you can. Be my guest.
