 |
Music •
Biography •
Press Kit •
Randomness •
Lyrics Gigs • Photos • Writing • Fun Stuff • Links • Contact |
Wednesday, October 29, 2003 A la recherche de l'avenir One must risk looking into the immediate future; one must devote earnest thought to the consequences of one's own actions; and one must endeavor to examine one's own motives and one's own heart. One's task is not to turn the world upside-down, but to do what is necessary at the given place and with a due consideration of reality. --Dietrich Bonhoeffer So many things I could write about... UWorship, an event for which I've been heavily involved in the planning, took place on Sunday night with around 1200 people. I'd love to hear thoughts from anyone who went. I also saw an excellent documentary at the Michigan Theater on Tuesday night, Bonhoeffer, about the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and pastor who took a stand against the Nazis, saving the lives of a number of Jews, and was involved in a plot to kill Hitler, reasoning that one could not stand by and watch the man murder millions in silence--ironically, he was a pacifist and believed that war is a great evil. Bonhoeffer and his friends were eventually discovered, jailed, moved to concentration camps, and executed. The documentary is enlightening; it explores how one man chose to live righteously in a world gone mad, challenging us to do the same. For some reason, I found it emotional as well, perhaps due to its implied challenge--would I have refused to desert Germany when safety was offered in America? Would I have stood up for the weak and suffering under a regime that derided them as evil? Would I have dared to speak out against a powerful leader on national radio, to call others to rise up against the evil of his party when that could have meant imprisonment or death? These aren't questions I glibly answer. And I'm learning about patience, about waiting. God and I have been in constant conversation about this, especially in the last day or so, and I'm thankful that I've finally learned what to pray for. I usually pray for wisdom and clarity, but now there is something more specific. Yet I fear that now that I have more invested in an affirmation, I'm going to hear "no." But I trust in the One who knows me better than I know myself, the One who by grace has saved me from more mistakes and condign consequences than I recognize. No matter how carefully you plan your goals they will never be more than pipe dreams unless you pursue them with gusto. --W. Clement Stone Word of the Day: Oscitation, noun: 1. The act of yawning. 2. Drowiness. ^ Top | 10:43 PM | | | 
Thursday, October 23, 2003 Un jeu des mots During my freshman year of high school, my Freud-obsessed English teacher instituted a daily vocabulary game (well, it wasn't a game per se, but my friend Dan and I turned it into one). She'd give the class a new word each day and make us write out its definition in a special section of our red binders; we then had to use it in two sentences underneath. Every Friday, we'd get to give her a word. If she couldn't spell and define it properly, we all got an extra credit point. Needless to say, the class took to finding obscurities--the game Balderdash was a great help, and we ended up with words like "tintinnabulary". But the greatness of the "game" was in this: if we heard any of the words used and could remember its context, we'd get an extra credit point. However, if we used a word properly ourselves, we'd get two extra credit points. Dan and I thought this was fun; we started writing poetry for each other using as many vocab words as possible, getting lines like, "The wyvern walked by the lake one day / so morose was he that he started to say / 'I wish I had my shawm so that I could play'." (Guess which words our teacher came up with and which words the class did.) I revived a version of this a year and a half ago under slightly different rules. It died after a few weeks, but its third incarnation was born four nights ago. Every three days, the participants will collectively choose a new, unfamiliar word. The word may only be used for points in context, once per conversation--IE saying, "Google, google, google!" is inadmissible. At the end of three weeks, the loser has to buy the winner ice cream at Stucchi's. Word of the Day: Vulpine, adj.: 1. Of, resembling, or characteristic of a fox. 2. Cunning, clever. ^ Top | 4:05 PM | | |
Thursday, October 16, 2003 The Stratford Festival I have postponed too long the writing of this entry--it seems these days my updates are becoming less frequent, although I intend the contrary. But a week and a half later, I'm finally composing the adventures of this year's trip to the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada. In summary: the plays varied in quality from wonderful to terrible but the trip itself was excellent for invigorating friendships. The details: After battling Friday rush-hour traffic in leaving Ann Arbor, Patrick, Tait, Ryan, James, and I were hungry, but wanted to cross the border into Canada before stopping for food. Then we decided that nothing we passed in Windsor--namely the ubiquitous Tim Hortons (and they are ubiquitous; on a previous trip to Niagara Falls, we counted 21 or 22 between Detroit and the Falls)--sounded appetizing, so an hour out from Windsor, no longer able to contain our famishment, we left the freeway for what we hoped would be a town with food of the non-Tim Hortons variety. Alas, when we reached the town we found fast food and an odd-looking restaurant in a gas station. And I do mean in the gas station; instead of the usual Quick Mart, a family diner called Betty's (as in Betty Boop, who dominated all of the brown decor) overran 90% of the "store", with the other percentage devoted to the typical pop, snacks, and lottery games. But brushing our doubts aside, we entered the restaurant in hoping against all odds to have discovered a small-town treasure. Things turned out better than expected. Our host, a robust, grandmotherly woman, greeted us when we walked in and extolled the virtues of every item on the menu. She actually spent quite an amount of time at our table--mind you, we also had a waitress--asking us where we were from, what we were studying, the usual questions. Patrick was pleased because smelt, a "quintessential Michigan food," was the night's special--and it was good. After dinner, James bought a lottery card and filled the car with shocked exclamations when he thought he'd won first $500, then $15,000. As it turned out, he was playing Battleship as one normally would instead of how the lottery would. He won $3 instead. We arrived to the first play on Saturday late, continuing (with trepidation) a tradition started last year by myself, Tait, and Ryan; my friend Steve, who was to be the token Canadian for the trip, met us in the lobby and bought his ticket as the rest of us, disappointed with our arrival time, climbed the stairs to the balcony of the Festival Theatre. I soon remembered why the Taming of the Shrew is not one of my favorite Shakespearean plays. Performed carefully, one can lessen the potential misogyny of the script; although the Stratford production distanced itself from a truly chauvinistic reading, I still found myself hitting Patrick and Steve as they laughed through Katherine's closing monologue about duty to husbands and the weakness of women. "Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth, / Unapt to toil and trouble in the world, / But that our soft conditions and our hearts / Should well agree with our external parts?" Hmm. The next performance of the weekend was Rogers and Hammerstein's The King and I, a musical I enjoy, a musical that was awful in production. The costumes were exquisite, as they are prone to be at Stratford, with incredible detail--many of the fabrics were imported from Thailand and represented Siam well. However, the production made two major mistakes. First, the actors performed on a thrust stage, an unusual choice for musical theatre, which relies a great deal on spectacle; normally musicals are best on prosceiums, where set pieces can be flown in easily for quick changes and an audience is distanced, forgetting the fact that people don't burst out into song constantly in real life. Thanks to the thrust and consquent staging, sight lines at points were terrible. In certain scenes, I could only see half of the actors; important when they were major players, not just the chorus. The second mistake was that the singers had no musical phrasing. And related to that, the sound system was inadequate, with volumes jumping, and the production used a recorded pit orchestra instead of live musicians. Urgh. However, Sunday's performance of Pericles, a Shakespearean romance, proved delightful. The play combines elements of A Winter's Tale and The Tempest; you have the queen who dies and comes back to life, magic, and the sea, all combined with an Odyessian quest. The production incoporated elements from cultures as diverse as Japan, Greece, and Persia, shifting the setting farther east than Shakespeare's original. Probably the most innovative decision was infusing the narrator with facets of butoh; he was painted entirely white and, wearing a piece of fabric resembling a melange of shorts and a loincloth, moved with steady grace. He was, by far, the most compelling piece of the production. The sets, though simple, were also intriguing--to close the play, a luminous sheet of silk was spread over the entire stage, which was slowly sucked into the trap in its center as the narrator descended. Overall, there was an atmosphere of mystique, of mystery, that was well conveyed in mostly cool lighting. Plays aside, the time was filled with a homey cafe, versions of taverns and pubs--although when I think about it, I'm not sure that anyone ever had any alcohol--and our hotel, a privately-owned yet rather generic place in St. Marys. Conversations ranged from God to beauty to stop-taking-so-many-posed-photos-in-restaurants-already and physical activities ranged from mock fighting to contact improv (a dancers' exercise) to this-is-how-you-do-a-martial-arts-roll. On the way back, we spent longer at the border than necessary and my friends saw me get truly angry (rare); the guard, who spoke with a Middle Eastern accent himself, wasn't "convinced that she's [me] actually American, or him [James, who's Hispanic] either." And this was even though we both had voter registrations and drivers licenses with us. But apparently you can register to vote without being a citizen--who knew? (For all permanent residents, visitors, and illegal immigrants: you too can be a part of the American political process! Just sign up to vote--they won't even check your citizenship, at least if the border guard is to be believed.) A sampling of photos from the weekend can be found on James's website. Wow, it appears I've just written a novel. ^ Top | 10:55 PM | | |
Wednesday, October 01, 2003 Sketchy So I was talking to my friend Kanika yesterday and she related a rather interesting experience; she had to go to court for an MIP. Ann Arbor has apparently instituted a new program: for an MIP you can either pay the usual $100 fine and have the charge show on your record or you can pay $200 and get it erased. According to Kanika, the woman who came up with this brilliant idea is going to get a promotion if she can get a certain quota of people to use this "new program". Does this sound wrong to anyone else? "I wish I had the balls to say, 'I'm guilty,' and pay the $100. Of course I paid the $200!" ^ Top | 2:15 PM | | |
|
