So, there I was, enthralled with the mock-Sesame Street staging and out comes Princeton. And his puppeteer was completely hot. Distractingly so. To the point that I started crafting methods to dump BF for a few and meet Howie for some reenactment of the sex scene in the show. I’ve always had a thing for shorter guys (5’7″-5’9″) and I’ve always had a thing for musical theatre, so Howie was definitely hitting my buttons. Plus, his performance was tremendous. Shit, what Avenue Q (and the rest of the shows that weekend) made clear is that Broadway really IS the place to hear a performance. The talent level is first rate, bar none. I’ve seen various national tours in Detroit (naturally), stagings in Toronto, Chicago, and San Diego and they do not compare. Perhaps it is the supersaturation of theatre people, but I thought the ticket price ($100 per) was worth it.

I also didn’t realize how deeply ingrained my affection and memories for Sesame Street and The Muppets are. I giggled like a four-year-old at nearly every little thing that was being said/done, gibbering/whispering, “Oh, that’s just like when on Sesame Street they did…” (Aside: ITunes allows me to reminisce by downloading the musical in five minutes and to listen now. Isn’t our modern world just wonderful? ) The has-been actor cameos, the mix of muppet and adult human interaction, bubble-gum tunes, the interjected educational commercials “com-mit-ment”, the vocabulary lesson, “Schadenfreude” (for which I chortled as soon as it started having a certain affection for German sensibilities), the complete reversal of morals through the Bad Idea Bears “You should kill yourself!” LOL, just a perfect pastiche!

My Israeli BF needed a little debriefing after the show to explain my nearly psychotic, good humor. I had to explain how sharply transgressive it was to have a muppet with chest hair, why singing boxes were brilliant, and why I wanted to purchase something with Bad Idea Bears plastered on it. It’s a little embarrassing when you’re having a transcendent, religious experience by yourself.

Lost

Been too busy to watch and to be honest I’m losing some steam. I don’t know why. It could be that I know that I have 30 more episodes to catch up on all the questions. It could be that Sun is being a bit of a hard-ass right now with Jin and I don’t like that. It could be that I wish Jack/Sawyer/Kate would just get it over with. I will say that the flashbacks are still compelling. For the most part I haven’t reached the point of saying, “I don’t care about that! What happens now?” We’ll see…

Career: “What’s Your Message?”

I came across a couple of thoughtful articles by Steve Pavlina, a blogger with a brain and a soul. Sometimes he’s a little too California for me and his cheerful optimism grates my frosty, dark, Northern composure, but then if I just shut up and read his articles I find that he has a lot of good things to say and consider.

Case in point: our use of the word “career”, how overdetermined its usage is, and how defining it for ourselves usually leads to some soulessness. He says that we tend to be instructed on what our careers should be by a bottoms-up method in which we look at our physical/mental strengths and match those up to whatever set of strengths reside in an occupation. The top-down method employs the “What turns you on? What’s your core passion?” roster of questions to find another set of profiles that reside in some occupation. What I love about Pavlina is that he is quick about avoiding false dichotomies: he says that both methods have their strengths and weaknesses so he marries them in an 80/20 top-down/bottoms-up split.

I strongly sympathized with his assessment of his wife’s difficulties as a secretary. Pavlina’s wife, Erin, could type 90+ words / min, and that skill was overplayed in career considerations. “Oh, you can type fast? Why don’t you be a secretary?” Being a secretary never addressed her passion to be and  exhibit being compassionate. Likewise, I have a great deal of technical skill but working in an environment where emotions are taboo (engineers) is what left me cold at Ford. It was a stultifying experience, to put it mildly.

In his other article, he talks about how often we look only at our career’s label and its functional responsibilities and not recognize how poor and flat that view is. That view doesn’t really consider the person do the work and their multi-faceted motivations for doing a job. “Oh, you’re an attorney. You must like doing legal paperwork.” If your motivation and passion in being an attorney is to negotiate peacefully that passion is completely lost in the appellation, “attorney”. Pavlina suggests reframing the label, maybe just for yourself to something relevant to your motivations and passions, in the case above, “Peacebringer.” Yeah, I know, it sounds a little fruity to me too. But I too see and feel so many of us who get completely depressed talking about their careers or jobs. We seem to wait for some sort of put-down since we are obliged to hate our job. It is the appropriate and fashionable thing to do. God forbid that we might more plainly state what joy we do derive from our work.

So, I’ve been thinking about what are my real passion is. As Avenue Q, might ask, What is my Purpose? I think it’s to be a counselor. What form that takes, I have no idea, but I need to try harder to express that passion to counsel and advise. I like doing it. I like helping people sort out their feelings about whatever it is. Now, I just need to be mindful of that drive and to build outlets to express it.

The last episode brought up some memories that I had wanted to write down. Last month, I joined my BF’s gay flag football tournament in New York. I made it clear that I was only “on the team” to accomplish a sole purpose, i.e. totally slut it up and attend a musical every day (3 days). Mission accomplished (I got in the film The Good Night as well). So, I saw Avenue Q (Friday evening), The Drowsy Chaperone (Saturday matinee), and The Color Purple (Sunday matinee). Collectively, it was one of the most succulent, wonderful things this poor little Midwestern homo could do. More on each soon…

Now that I’ve found Swan Station and the Tailies, I find myself even more frustrated by how far I am behind from all my friends. There’s so much I want to ask but I know they’re going to be all, “Oh, yeah… Just keep watching!” I’m losing my humor and really just want to be CAUGHT UP! I pretty much love everyone except Locke. I’m not believing that his faith in the Island is concordant with what he’s seen. I guess I would expect a touch more doubt. I was touched when Sharon died. I will miss her. Mister Eko is more stereotypically written than I usually would expect in a Lost character. Clare is being a twit with Charlie.

Musings

• The Numbers: I’ve been thinking about them a lot. 23 survivors in the tail section 43 survivors in the fuselage (42+1).
• Is it just me or should it be more rare for Ana Lucia and Jack to both work for their parents? As BF said, “Everybody has Father issues!” Amen.
• Is Sun going to be a Dominatrix? Is there going to be a three-way or what?

Getting a little tired of this season’s same scene/different perspective technique. I think they’re finally pulling out of that and moving on to the Tailers. I’m so glad they’re fleshing out the tragedies of Hurley’s big win and I’m glad he got to play Santa Claus with the food. Locke’s flashbacks with Helen and his father were so poignant. I was crushed when Sun buried the bottle of messages. It’s too bad the writers couldn’t have left the question open longer about what happened to the Rafters, but then there would have been a ton of flashbacks and I’d be even more annoyed.

Questions

• I’m intrigued with how Anna Lucia became a hard ass.
• I’m wondering if Locke’s lesson to be learned from the Island is that you will need to love others and rely on others in order to fulfill your purpose.
• My friend S thinks Rose’s husband is a dick. I’m intrigued to see if how he plays out.

So, I made it past the finale and chortled with the cliffhangers that would have left me furious for the months after if I had followed the series live. Glad to see Jin made it out of the drink, was worried there for a tic or two. I like that the writers are playing with 108 and other Asian cultural artifacts like the symbolism of the Book of Changes, Tao Te Ching.

Musings

• Did the writers use Tao Te Ching hexagrams in the classical way (indicating the eight cardinal directions) for the Dharma project or do those hexagrams reveal something else? (I want to look elsewhere online but I’m not gonna!)
• I’m guessing that Desmond had no intention of coming to the Island during his race around the world and despite his having quite the regular workout routine has just encamped himself in the Dharma bunker.
• It appears that the “illness” is real and not a figment of Danielle’s murderous mania, but Desmond seems a little crackers too.
• The Others have a thing for kids (not pedophilic, I’m sure) and it could be because they have newer DNA, stem cells, whatever.
• I wonder why the Dharma project initiators (who used Apple II’s apparently and data tape banks) would require someone to “reset the clock” every 108 min?/hr? Now that I think on it, could it be that for whatever the Dharma project was for the participants needed to be inoculated regularly? But then why did Desmond have Locke do the number key entry to reset the clock?

Hmm…

Emotions

I love Sun & Jin! I was so glad to see them make up at the end of Exodus, p1 (They remind me of the ups-and-downs that BF and I have dealt with and how cultural differences can be both exotic/attractive and isolating). I was glad that Shannon stopped being a bitch for five seconds and took Vincent. I was teary when Vincent tried to swim out after Walter. I’m glad that Jack heard about his dad from Sawyer. I’m glad that the writers wanted to show that Sawyer is more wounded and angry and is ultimately trying for redemption. And I’m really glad that Ar[n]dst got his just desserts. I giggle at the thought of how the writers might have been exorcising their demons of embittered high school teachers. Rose (the black wife — sorry, PC police, that’s all the writers have really given me to work with) should be providing some wisdom to Clare, so I’m a little surprised that the writers haven’t let the Wise Woman of the Island, a.k.a. Rose, do that.

Random musings

• I (as the jury) am still out on Kate and I don’t know if it’s casting or the monstrously complex background that’s being gestured to. I keep waiting on how they’ll reconcile a truly frightened Kate in Episode 1 (who needs the “Just let the fear in for 5 seconds…” speech from Jack) with the total hard-ass she can be. Was that first portrayal just an act? I guess I was fooled then.
• And what the hell is Kate thinking of romancing/being nice alternately toward both Jack and Sawyer?
• I’m waiting to see where Sun got all of her medicinal knowledge.
• I’m now waiting to see what’s become of Alex, Danielle’s girl.
• My mind (the Eternal Mathematician’s) is still playing with the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42… Is it a mathematical series? Which one? Fibonacci, no…

That’s all for now. Just wanted to write that down…

I did it! I updated WordPress without wanting to kill myself. The thing that I learned though is FatCow (my hosting site) won’t let me directly upload gzip files directly to my site and it appears that their ZIP utility doesn’t seem to decompress the package into the WordPress directory. No biggie, 7 minutes w/FireFTP from a decompressed package on my desktop and… Voila! New, more stable WordPress (fingers crossed). And in playing with WordPress, I thought I’d change up the design to something a little more regal, Royale 1.0. Très Chic!

Ugly Betty

Anyhow, while charting out my day with FreeMind, a mind-mapping tool, that geeks who worship Getting Things Done play with, I watched Ugly Betty and I need to tell everyone, “WATCH THE SHOW! It will make you smile, laugh, cry and somehow make your day a little brighter!” Tanner Stransky – EW.com said it very well, I love Marc and Amanda’s vile antics and cuts, but I admire that the writers appear not to be throwing away an opportunity to examine more critically the hysterical obsession gay men have with their bodies and their image. It will be awesome to see what they do with budding romance between a paunchy photographer like Cliff and an extremely superficial fashion assistant like Marc. I also want to shout props to the writers for being so deft at balancing all the characters. I just keep thinking, “Wow, what a great crew!”

Lost

So, BF & I have a new obsession. It was the sort of thing where I had not returned movies to Blockbuster.com in forever, finally did, needed to do ironing and then, “So, what’s with Lost?”, the ever-skeptical BF asks. “Um, friends liked it, recommended it and I have work to do…” And he didn’t leave and now we keep watching and now we have something like 60-some-odd episodes to go! Well, I’ll have more to say, but I’m going to wait to finish with Season 1 to critique.

Monster House

The Bad:

The Uncanny: I have not seen Polar Express, mostly because I thought that its lack of facial expression in the trailers was creepy. This, in turn, reminded me of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and first reading of Dr. Masahiro Mori’s theory of the Uncanny Valley. In 1970, he suggested that as a simulation of a human being’s appearance and/or motion becomes increasingly accurate, there is very suddenly a point at which humans’ interest in the creation turns into utter repulsion. There is still some of that dissonance in Monster House. They couldn’t get the faces to register emotion enough. Even though the production had something like 70 points of detection on everyone’s faces, they still wound up looking like they had just gotten a Botox treatment.

Kathleen Turner as Constance/The House: Mind you, she was fine, but the notion of taking such a role… I thought that Turner had a lot of cajones to take a part as a circus freak/possessed house. I hope she got a nice check for her troubles.

The Plot: I know this is a kids’ movie but it seemed a bit too simple at times.

The Good:

The characters: Their acting was just fine. Verbally, everything was perfect.

The animation: Despite the Uncanny Valley, you have to be amazed at what Sony accomplished. A good deal of this film is very, very beautiful to look at.

Is it possible to have excellent performances in a movie and still have a terrible film? In this case, yes. It’s just that the movie’s writers and director were simply not up to the task of cutting two-thirds of a novel’s content into a two-and-a-half hour film. I was feeling some form of senility while watching the film: Wait, this isn’t what happened in the book… I can’t remember exactly what it was that happened in the book, but this is wrong, I tell you, wrong! There will be some debate on whether this is as bad as the third film, but that’s a parlor game for geeks. It’s just kinda ho-hum and I felt sorry for those watching the film without having read the book since its pacing and editing is slipshod and mad-dash.

I think there were a lot of creative choices that were just stupid.

<SPOILERS>

Ms. Umbridge: What makes Ms. Umbridge one of the most memorable villains in literature (paraphrasing Stephen King) is that she is simultaneously ostentatiously well-kept, implicitly repulsive, and psychotically serene. She is also a bureaucrat, which in Rowling’s world, is evil yet entirely different from Voldemort’s. Most importantly, she hates Harry deeply and that laser-like hatred steers her arc perfectly, almost admirably, through the text. All this being said, what should not have happened in this film was the flippant way in which Harry’s “lines” are revealed and it should not have happened that all of Dumbledore’s Army were required to also write “lines” while Ms. Umbridge observes. This is a wrong-headed approach to portraying Ms. Umbridge’s nature. In the book, Harry spends most of the year being tortured by Ms. Umbridge and her lines. It is only found out very late. He isolates himself in this punishment and for the most part Ms. Umbridge reserves this punishment for Harry. This torture becomes a perverted bond between the two and I think that is one of the reasons why she is such a memorable villain. In our age, corporal punishment to children is morally wrong and this secret abuse exhibits what Rowlings wants us to think of her character extremely effectively. Making Umbridge a de facto Fascist was really a disappointment.

The shoes: You’re the director. You don’t want a children’s movie to end on a total downer. You want to lighten things up a bit with some spacey-smiled interaction with Luna. To underscore Luna’s retarded aphorisms, we see what I believe to be Luna’s shoes at the end of the film hanging from an arch. Directing 101: You should have exhibited them prominently earlier in the film (LIKE WHEN WE’RE INTRODUCED TO HER IN THE CARRIAGE AND NOT WASTE TIME TALKING ABOUT A NECKLACE!). I walked away thinking, “Why didn’t we see those ugly-ass shoes before? Seeing them now, I can tell you, I DON’T CARE ABOUT HER SHOES!

3D Effects: They were pointless. Did it make any real difference to see Harry flying at you or to have a flaming snake coming at you? Not for me, but then I’ve seen 3D effects before and the kiddies might not have.

The prophecy: Some time and thought should have gone into outlining or at least somewhat describing the prophecy’s importance. Anyone not reading the books had to be completely lost as to why it was so important to have and what was the consequence for it being shattered. Directing 101: Exhibit this discussion during the denouement speech with Dumbledore, nitwit.

The budget: After watching the HBO junket-fest, I was disappointed to see so many of the sets rehashed. I was also disappointed in seeing that damned covered cat-walk used constantly and that the catwalk is actually a giant blue-screen effect. C’mon Warner Bros, this franchise makes money like crazy. Spend a little money on appropriately needed special effects LIKE: In the book, the statues at the Ministry of Mysteries are animated during the duel. You exhibit the statues repeatedly and they just sit there! Couldn’t you borrow the same concept from the first movie to animate them? ALSO (off-topic since it’s from the last movie but I’m noticing a trend of stinginess): In the Goblet of Fire, what happened to the Sphinx and the spider in the labyrinth? Did you really have to resort to the special effects of lashing bushes from The Shining?

<END SPOILERS>

I’m sure this movie’s project was not to embitter me, but they did a magnificent job ruining my drive to see Harry Potter movies on the big screen opening day.