Tepid on the heels of “These are a few of my favorite words, Part I”, it’s Part II! II times the furor. II times the excitement! II times the number of words!

Today you get to choose between the following un-related p-words:

These don’t have any great potential for rich image and metaphor. They are just fun to say, use, and be pretentious with. Pretension deploy!

My dear papa arrived on Thursday, and on Friday we renewed a tradition from the days when my parents lived here; concerts at Chamber Music Northwest. We had a really lovely time, and it once again made me feel that I must make time in my life for oboe once more. It also reminded me of my wistful dreams of putting together an amateur chamber music group as an outlet and encouragement for my musical urges.

The most fabulous parts of the program (program notes in rtf here) were the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Violin and Continuo in B-flat Major by Johann Friedrich Fasch, and (big surprise) Concerto for Oboe, Violin, Strings and Continuo in C Minor, BWV 1060 by Johann Sebastian Bach. I was a little disappointed in the suite they chose from Handel’s Water Music - there’s a beautiful, ethereal (wait for the bias…) oboe duet in Water Music that I was hoping to hear. The Vivaldi Bassoon Concerto was fascinating, a very technically demanding piece for an instrument that very seldom gets to show off (Go bassoons! Double-reed solidarity and all that.) and exquisitely performed by Julie Feves, who was celebrating her 30th year of performing at CMNW. However, it wasn’t the most socks-rocking Vivaldi I’ve ever heard - I will only expound further on the two pieces that inspired me to write “BUY RECORDING” on the programme.

Concerto for Oboe, Violin, Strings and Continuo in C Minor, BWV 1060 by Johann Sebastian Bach: I love Bach. I hear people saying he’s sterile and unemotional all the time, and I can only think that they don’t notice emotional content more subtle than Alanis Morrissette. This particular piece was performed by Allan Vogel, a Puckishly twinkling wonderful oboist who’s been playing there much longer than I’ve been going. Oh, and a violin and some other people. Don’t get me wrong, violins are okay, and this violinist was superb. But Vogel is amazing. My dad and I kept giving each other these “wow” looks. The Adagio was heart-breakingly beautiful, and astoundingly well-played. The kind of sweetness I am always reaching for in lyric oboe music on almost every single note. And it’s very hard to play quietly on the oboe, so you have that difficulty on top of everything else. It was just amazing.

Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Violin and Continuo in B-flat Major by Johann Friedrich Fasch: I especially loved the first fast movement in this sonata de chiesa (slow-fast-slow-fast). The soloists tossed the lead melody betwixt them like the golden ball you see princesses tossing in fairy tale books - a seamless, shimmering, graceful flight. More than any other piece I can remember at present, listening to it conveys how it feels to play chamber music - the intimate trust, the ensemble where each individual is exposed, the carefully crafted beauty of it. The tossing of a ball is one metaphor I would use to encapsulate the feeling—perhaps more apt would be a great huge soap bubble which every musician is blowing into with a wand. It is beautiful, many-hued, and delicate, and depends on each and every one of you getting it right. Lovely.

So, anyone in the Portland area a good violinist, pianist, flautist, clarinetist, et c.? I ache to play again.

Some of you may know that I cry at everything. Matt laughs gently at it, and I don’t blame him—I remember laughing when I was a child at my mother’s sudden brimmings. I had to start laughing out of the other side of my mouth as I got older, and the Waterworks came for me.

At first, it was controllable. I would start crying earlier on in something already weepworthy—“Somewhere in Time”, for instance. Then really happy endings started to get me more often. Soon, I was crying at teasers for “Dinosaur” ‘because it’s so beautiful!’ (if I’d known there was TALKING in it, I would have cried for DIFFERENT reasons.) I cried at “Alien Resurrection”. I cried at “Dead Again” every time until the sixth time. Of course I cried at “Terminator”, that’s not ludicrous. In perhaps an all time record, I think that “Return to Me” had me tissue-taking within the first three minutes.

Don’t think I’m too weird here, but I like to cry at movies and books. It feels good in a way that crying for yourself never does. You wash off your heart by giving it to someone else - a someone else who doesn’t exist, so their woes needn’t linger too long. But what I wonder is why I get so much worse over time. The most obvious explanation, is, of course, hormones, which has a great deal of correlation going for it - now that puberty’s done, I guess the hormonal change is “gradually becoming a Mom-like person.” But there are other things about which I wonder.

Do children, very small children, cry like that? I don’t think so…it’s kind of pointless, really, to cry about something your parents can’t fix for you—which, sorry, boys ‘n’ girls, does apply to Romeo and Juliet, and Bambi’s mom. So is it purely the process of becoming less selfish that brings on this empathy? I think one of the reasons I cry more now may very well be that (let’s face it, most tearjerkers are romantic in nature) I am in a couple, I can sympathize much more vividly with being tragically decoupled. Do people become less selfish, or does their sphere of experience expand so that they can relate fictional experiences more clearly to their selves?

Another theory I have is that it’s because I’m less angsty now than I was as a lonely high school student. Maybe happiness makes you more open, less inhibited. Of course, maybe you just have a larger sink of sorrow in you to draw upon as you get older, more grandparents die, you know more of what is wrong in the world, et c. Very contradictory theories.

For now, I’ll just keep on trying not to let Matt see the Xena credits are making me tear up.

I kept meaning to blog yesterday. I even started a blog article about a movie adaptation I find odd. But it was far too intellectual for my mood, so I kept putting it off. Then I went home and cooked, because my dad came to town yesterday! So of course, my Dad being my Dad, I spent all last evening being very intellectual indeed. Conversation ranged from climbing adaptations in jaguars to new neurological findings to the Earps to exercise to, well, movie adaptation. I finally had to go to bed because Matt was looking stormy about sleep. My dad, you see, is retired, and therefore doesn’t care much when he sleeps. Lucky chap.

By the by, think no-cop thoughts for me today, I left my purse (license, insurance card, et c.) at home.

Warning: Self-indulgent melancholy alert!

My current book-bag reading material is The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives, by Alan Turner. I’m beginning to think that reading books in the field that you spent most of your life planning to enter and then threw over impetuously in order to write novels you haven’t finished and get a degree that leads to meaningless and oppressive office jobs is a bad idea. So are sentences that long—do what I say, not what I do.

I know I get the same heady, pretentious joy from reading great works of European literature and obscure Russian books in public, but there’s something even more pretentious and smuggifying about sitting in Starbucks poring over drawings of Dinofelis skulls and comparing the zygomatic arches. You feel arcane, keyed in to secret knowledge. Small children gape at your book, and casual glances from latte-waiters are baffled.

I’ve left the brotherhood of bones, I am a pretender. I miss the exclusivity of it—“You guys all gave up on paleontology when you turned 6, but I’m hardcore!” Half the world is writing a novel in their spare time. Or at least it seems that way in Starbucks.

What actor of tall stature and protruding cheekbones has appeared in Buffy, Deep Space Nine, The X-Files, and “Terminator”? Can you tell me (at least a part he’s played) without using the IMDb? Matt, if you remember from my telling you, you are disqualified.

I was quite excited to see this movie after the rip-roaring trailer full of action, pirates, humor, pirates, pretty clothes, pirates, swordfights, pirates, good music, pirates, and corset jokes. And zombie pirates. Deep in my heart there is much swash that needs to be buckled, and this movie promised to buckle all the swash in the world, let alone in my wee girlish heart. I included it in my girlish-and-relaxing bachelorette party plans for the Bride, and we all enjoyed it a great deal. Certain Orlando Bloom fangirls had a drool problem, but we didn’t drown. We came out of the movie and one of my merry crew, sitting down in the driver’s seat of her car, said, “There is no way I can keep from speeding now.”

This movie delivered on its promises and more. Action? Apart from a little well-done suspense at the beginning, the whole thing is action—and it’s varied, funny, colorful, and exciting, never boring and repetitive. It’s 2 hours and 23 minutes long, and it feels like one long held breath. As I overheard after seeing it the first time, “I want to go watch it again! I’m so sorry it’s over!!!” The sea battles were wonderful, and the swordfights…. Occasionally on the RPGnet forums we’ve discussed “interesting places to duel”, or “how to spice up a fight.” Skip those discussions, go to this movie. They are never content to have a simple, formulaic sword fight, or to have the fight stay the same for more than a minute. It’s a delight.

Humor? There was almost as much of that as of action. Between Johnny Depp’s is-he-mad-or-brilliant Captain Jack Sparrow, the bumbling cabin boys of the evil pirates, the squabbling British Marines, and the pirates of the (Pirates of the Caribbean ride) port Tortuga, I hurt my ribs laughing. Let me mention again—Captain Jack Sparrow. In case you missed that. There is a reason his is the biggest face on the [http://www.faerye.net/img/articles/pirateposter.jpg|image|poster]. He has more style than Zaphod Beeblebrox, more zippy one-liners than Bond, more nerve than the Scarlet Pimpernel, and more gold teeth than you. I did not know there was that much swash in the world, but there must have been, because it’s buckled now. And he made me laugh while he did it.

The undead-pirate effect was really well done, used a great deal but not gratuitously, and it enabled me for the first time in my life to link two of my favorite things—swashbuckling swordfights, and beating on the undead. It was so beautiful…like a crystal tear….sniff

I probably needn’t go on about how the promises of pirates, rousing music, pretty clothes, pirates, and corset jokes (they’re funny cuz they’re TRUE!) were amply fulfilled. But there were a few things I wasn’t expecting. Compelling characters (other than Captain Jack, who had me hooked from the trailer) - Orlando Bloom’s character, Will Turner, was not at all two-dimensional, despite all his earnest gush, and actually changed and grew over the course of the movie. Keira Knightley’s character, Elizabeth Swann, was more delightfully spunky, resourceful, and insolently brave than any movie heroine since Evie Carnahan in “The Mummy” (and even prettier). Not to mention the fact that all the minor characters were spot-on, and getting a really superb actor like Geoffrey Rush to play Captain Barbossa raised him far above the Captain Hook stereotype - while still being, well, an evil pirate captain. Arrr.

The other unexpected thing was the plot. It hung together beautifully, and curvetted and twined interestingly without becoming too labyrinthine to follow. Everything was well-motivated, the mystery went on long enough to be mysterious but not long enough to be annoying. It was really well-written, which was, I admit, a surprise.

I have now seen this movie twice. I will probably see it a third time in the near future. Amazon will e-mail me when it is available on DVD. I loved this movie. It made me happy, from the first shot of a proper young British lass singing a pirate song into the sea-mist, to the closing credits. Without a doubt, my favorite movie this year. It will go on the shelf next to “Princess Bride”. 10 out of 10, with two thumbs up, a happy pirate dance, a yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum.

I am back from Cleveland. Matt and I went to attend (and, in my case, participate in) the wedding of two of our dear friends from college. The wedding went well, and our friends seemed very happy. It was lovely to see all our friends again, and a little surreal—most people seem just the same, as familiar as if we had only been gone a day, yet at the same time, half of them are married or engaged, going to grad school, or other such grown-up nonsense!

I’ve never even been a bridesmaid before, let alone a MoH, so I am not sure how well I did. I tried to help the Bride, make things a little easier on her, and give her the occasional laugh. But this I do know—I didn’t lose the ring, I didn’t light anyone on fire (something the Groom was worried about, with the unity candle ceremony), I made faces to help the Groom stint his tears as promised, and they’re married. So the important stuff got done! The Bride looked gorgeous, and you couldn’t wish happiness on two more deserving, kind, funny people.

Cleveland seems much the same. It seems that having been there for such a short time makes the contrast with home all the more drastic—home seems so clean, both the sky and the streets and the buildings. The mountains and hills frame the sky, and there are no flaming smokestacks. I admit it, while the flaming smokestacks fill me with a sort of atavistic dread, they are a spectacle. All the fascination of a candle-flame writ large in the night sky in a seemingly phosphorescent blue and orange.

Just a short note to let you know I am back. I have missed my blogging and shall be prolific!