Daily Haiku - Ocotber 19th, 2014

Fifth day, sans caffeine
Yawns erupt with no warning
Time to take a nap

Daily Haiku - October 18th, 2014

Cold wind rises up
Blankets added to the bed
Autumn has arrived.

Daily Haiku - October 17th, 2014

Rising with the sun
Oven on and batter set
Baked goods namaste.

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My friend Annie's birthday is tomorrow and I was too lazy to make them last night, so I got up early to make a double batch of the Spicy Ginger Brown Butter Blondies that everyone loves so much.

Theatre News: 'Scenes From a Marriage'

During our weekly company meeting, one of our Co-Artistic Directors recapped his most recent visit to New York, which involved seeing a number of plays including 'Scenes From a Marriage'. The premise as he described it sounded utterly fascinating to me. It's the story of a married couple portrayed at three different points in their relationship--when things are going great, when things start unraveling, and the fallout.

What makes this so interesting is that each time period is played by a different set of actors simultaneously to each other in adjoining mini-stages. The audience will see all three pieces, but in different orders, and because they are performed next to each other, dialogue from each set will occasionally drift over to the others. And that's just in the first act.

In the second act, the separate stages are combined into a single set where all three couples perform on stage together, sometimes speaking at the same time as their counterparts. Again, this sounds amazing and I wish I was in New York to check it out.

Here's a link to a New York Time's review that goes more in-depth about the entire production: A Marriage in Trouble, in Triplicate.

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Daily Haiku - October 13th, 2014

The needle plunges
Piercing skin and muscle both
Medicine at work.
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I got my annual flu shot today and as usual my entire upper arm was sore within an hour, and will likely continue that way through tomorrow. Such is the (minor) price we pay for the miracle of immunization.

Daily Haiku - October 9th, 2014

My shirt's soaked in sweat
Knees aching on the walk home
I have no regrets.
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If you've sampled the chocolate grand marnier mousse cake from Porto's bakery, then you will understand my willingness to do penance at the gym.

"Thin layers of chocolate mousse and chiffon cake soaked with Grand Marnier syrup & a touch of orange marmalade. Finished with Belgian chocolate ganache."

AFI 100: The Graduate (#17)

This was a real disappointment for me. Coming in at number 17 on AFI's 100 Greatest American Films of All Time, I was expecting a lot from this film, but it turns out this was very much a product of the time in which it was created and I don't think it translated very well to my current day sensibilities.

Pretty much everyone in the film is unlikeable, either for the entire duration or starting about halfway in, and it's rare when any of their actions appear to have sensible motivation(s), if any, behind them. The ending of the film is the perfect example of this, wherein characters do completely inane things that resolve in ways that they shouldn't and still nobody seems particularly happy with the outcome. I was barely halfway through the film when I started eying the DVD player to see how much more of this I had to bear.

Afterwards I went to my roommate Jeff, who had done his graduate work in film, and asked him what made this film so great. Surprisingly, he wasn't particularly enamoured with the film either, and could only note that he thought the film had introduced the concept of the montage and that in part was why it was so well received. I haven't actually been able to verify that, and frankly, I don't have any interest in doing so.

However, during a phone conversation with my father later that week, he pointed out that the film paralleled what people were feeling and doing at the time. The film was released in 1967, as the United States was knee deep in the Vietnam war. The country was divided on what should be done and there was a lot of confusion and bad decisions being made. He said a lot of Americans could identify with the lead, Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman), and his inability to figure out what to do with their lives.

While this certainly gave me a bit more perspective on the film, it wasn't enough to make up for the time I lost watching it, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.