Imaginary time capsule

Again back from the film club, and after watching The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) I've come to realize a couple of things:

You know that creepy guy who was the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? That was Robert Helpmann, a celebrated Australian ballet dancer! Also he was kinda hot. And Wikipedia tells me his obituary in The Times described him as "a homosexual of the proselytizing kind" which I find all kinds of hardcore. And a little humorous.

Second, that this haunting song right here:

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- is, in fact, from The Tales of Hoffmann. I've loved it for years, and I had no idea. (And oh my God, it's the music from the Evergood coffee commercials! I had 'Barcarolle' on CD, and just now I realized it's used in those commercials!)

She says, "Come with me, I could set you free
You could start climbing ladders if you listen to me
'Cause you make me feel so incredibly alone"

I finally watched The Merchant of Venice - you know the movie adaption they did a few years ago with Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons. Very nice.

I think I read the play when I was going through my Shakespeare phase a decade ago (that might not sound like a long time, but it is when you're twenty-two). I loved how they dropped certain lines and replaced them with meaningful looks and gestures. Antonio's love for Bassanio was beautifully handled.

Speaking of Jeremy Irons (whom I've just discovered has the most adorable eclectic sense of style): Seeing all the advertising for the new adaption of Brideshead Revisited has made me want to rewatch the old one (I don't want to see the new one. Every movie that doesn't feature John Gielgud snarking has already failed on some basic level).

Memo to self; When in Bergen, find it in the library and rewatch.


If there's one thing British literature has taught me, it's that renouncing catholicism inevitably leads to queerness.

Has anyone seen the new adaption? Is it any good?

My love is mellow and my hopes are strung
Around that cupid fellow
Behold, the moon is yellow
And the night is young

Sometimes I get the feeling something is amiss when I hear myself, a twenty-yearold in the year 2008, sigh my heart out as I'm listening to Bing Crosby on the tube. And I'd really love a big Bing poster on my bedroom wall. No wait, I got it - a poster of the Rythm Boys! Lovely trio, and I'd technically have a boy band poster for conformity.

The embarassing thing - I'm a Bing fan, and I haven't seen a single of the Road movies. I just can't find them in Norway, it's horrible.

Okay, you know what - good intentions or not, this book reading thing doesn't work. I got my hands on a free bookseller's edition of Falcone's Cathedral of the sea, proud to for once read a new bestseller I can pimp to my customers. And then I found I really don't like it. I'm only a chapter into it and I already think it's rubbish. So. I went to the library to find something else new and exciting, as I've forbid myself to buy any books indefinately, and I would have gotten His dark materials if it hadn't been lent out, and then I very nearly got Beauvoir's The second sex, but ultimately decided against it, because it isn't exactly new, and if I loved it, I don't think I could convince my boss to stock the shop with it. So in the end, exhausted, I got Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip.

Which is a good choice in that it's fairly new, awardwinning, seems interesting, and we actually got it in our tiny store. Which is exactly why my boss is reading it as well. God, I give up. I'll just read it.

So, yesterday I discovered a lot of things:
- Stephen Fry is making a new televised chapter of Douglas Adams' Last chance to see (OMG YAY).
- Knut Risan voiced just about every male Disney character I liked as a child (Basil Mouse, Robin Hood, Prince Cornelius...).
- There should really be a database of which actors did what in translated Disney movies.
- Searching for clips of Brideshead Revisited, you find an assortment of scenes of the Charles/Sebastian variety, and not a single one of the awesomeness that is John Gielgud playing Charles' father. (Damnit Anthony Andrews was adorable in his youth.)

Also: The interconnectedness of a lot of things:

( It's like the Bacon factor, only with gay affairs and Doctor Who )

God, I can't believe I paid twenty kroner to make my wet laundry damp. I had to run my clothes twice in the tumbledryer because other students kept opening the door to check if it was available. Listen, smartarses: If you put your hand on the dryer and it's SHAKING LIKE HELL, it's busy. If you open the door, it'll only take even longer, because then I have to go down, see that somebody interrupted the drying programme, swear for five minutes and then pay for an entire second run of drying.

All my clothes are WET, damnit!

Ingen så henne komme
Hun hvisket lavt ved min dør
Og lokket med løfter så tomme
Og gråt slik bedragersker gjør

Guh, what a day. Overslept, which meant no breakfast. School went okay. Then I bought a small container of fries and wolfed them down at the tube while this snooty old couple kept whispering and giving me disapproving glances and actually tsk-tsking. I'm sorry that I disturb your delicate feelings by eating junk food, forgive me. Bah, I wish I could have shouted something crude at them.

Here I originally wrote a long epic tale of my trip to the police station to renew my passport, but all you need to know is that I was thwarted (new regulations, I have to bring my birth certificate) and that's the main reason I'm in a foul mood. Thankfully the pet shop had, after many months, restocked their CareFresh bedding. Carrying and using fluffy paper pulp is so much easier than the heavy Chipsi bags. Thank god something went right today.

My plans for the remains of the day is to shower, watch the rest of Our mutual friend, make and eat some spaghetti bolognese (I've never ever ever cooked spaghetti without having guests over, but today I intend to treat myself), maybe play some Jack and Daxter, do some light reading in Campbell's Biology (Finally found it! Without a doubt the priciest book I've ever bought, but I intend to use it for many many years to come) and maybe, if I'm feeling optimistic, tidy my room.

Have you ever been asked "If you could live in a different era, what would you choose?" ? My initial response is always the sixties or fifties, and people go, "Aww, can't you get a bit of a broader perspective?" And I keep thinking that in most ages, well, it's always sucked quite a bit to be female. Unless you're Cleopatra or Queen Victoria. And I suspect that might have sucked a little bit as well.

But yes, then I'd chose the Victorian age. Wonderful things happening in literature and culture, a perfect blend of SCIENCE and old superstitions abound. And clothes, those pretty, pretty clothes. But then I'd get pretty sick of corsets and bonnets and thirty layers of clothing, not to mention pollution and manure in the streets and the poverty and - well, other things not so nice.

I'm thinking one my favourite bits about the Victorian age was ( dun-dun DUUUN )

I try to keep all this mind but I still grin at Eugene Wrayburn showing absolutely no surprise upon waking up and finding Mortimer Lightwood in his bedroom. And God, how they keep on preening eachother.

Oh well, some of us can never get our mind out of the gutter.

Og robothjertet banket og robotmunnen lo
Og ropte ut de ordene som bare du forsto:
Slå meg på, slå meg på
Sett meg ned og la meg gå

You know, I had forgotten what a great movie My fair lady was. It's been years since I last watched it. I think it must have been the first musical I ever saw and I didn't think much of it, but now, after having watched countless of the "golden age" musicals, I've really learned to appreciate a good plot. They're too rare in musicals. Just the row in the second part of the movie - There's some quite complex psychological motives surfacing there. I still think Audrey Hepburn's performance is a little grating at times, but it's still such a fascinating story.

( Essay: Is Prof. Higgins a latent homosexual? )

Anyway. Lately I've been absolutely starving for a good read. I'm still three-quarters through Martin Chuzzlewit but comparing to Dicken's other works, it's a bit rubbish. So browsing through the darker corners of my bookshelf, I found Midshipman Hornblower, and thought I'd give it a chanse. I don't think I've ever mentioned it, but I'm a real Hornblower fangirl. When I had mono I woke up early each day just to watch the TV series. Which reminds me: I knew it!! There was something familiar with Lt. Bush - he's from Doctor Who, not just that, he was the Doctor.

Derailed there. Well, what I was getting at was that yesterday in Oslo I bought Beau Brummell: The ultimate dandy by Ian Kelly. It is mighty great. And a pretty cover. I love me some dandies.

Another thing I bought: The Doctor Who TV movie. Oh what a horrid, horrid movie. So American, so cliché, so eighties (even though it was made in 1996!). Most of the time it's not making any sense ("I can't make your dreams come true forever, but I can make them come true today" *Takes off with a motorbike*), and when it for once does make sense it's just embarassing to look at. Car chases! Romance! Strange bondage! Horribly fake contact lenses! Amnesia! All of this in the epitome of cult television, Doctor who. Oh, and let's make the alien guy in a movie that circles around one alien guy among humans - let's make him half human, shall we? Though it has no bearing on the plot, let's make his mother human.

Okay, it had two things going for it: Paul McGann's costume, and the appearance of the Seal of Rassilon. I laughed a lot, I did, but I can only remember once when it was the movie's intention ("No, my shoes: They fit!" *Runs across screen like a loon*). I know it's canon, I can't argue with it, but meanwhile I'll pretend no characters in this movie knew what they were talking about. Temporal instability in the Tardis psyke engine or somesuch.

Oooh, and Snooky bought the first volume of the anime series Samurai deeper Kyo. It was entertaining, but quite disappointing compared to the manga. It was just lots of panning stills, and the fighting was poorly executed. And they gave Benitora pink hair! And changed the look of my favourite character, Yukimura Sanada!

Well, another month, another Kyo manga...

Come out in the silv'ry moonlight
Of love we'll whisper so soft and low
Seems as though can't live without you
Listen please, honey do

I can't believe how much this song sounds exactly like Dinah. Not like ABBA songs sort of sounds like eachother - no, it's made the exact same way. One verse, first sung slowly, then a sped-up version with a male chorus, then a solo, then an improv of the verse by the lead singer. It's even got the same dodgy rhyming sceme: "Ida / Sweet as apple cider" and "Dinah / Is there anyone finer".

Well, it's interesting to me, okay?

In other news, the other day I sat up all night watching an old movie that puzzled me (which was, in itself, pretty stupid as I had to attend a wedding the morning after). You see, there was this actor that looked, spoke and moved like Danny Kaye, but I knew it wasn't Danny Kaye, because it couldn't be Danny Kaye. I watched the movie, which was a dark, pretty slapsticky comedy, and in the end I found out: The young actor was Roman Polanski! I've always thought of Roman Polanski as this old, withered fellow, when he in fact was pretty sweet-looking as a youth (or maybe it was the period costume that dazzled my eyes).

Things like this never stops to amaze me. This was the movie (and the actor), by the way:

Sure, it looks pretty sraightforward and heterosexual now, not so much when he's wrestling on the floor with a effeminate male vampire in nothing but a nightshirt.

Ooh, and I found out - this movie was originally called Dance of the vampires, which means the musical Michael Crawford was in during the Michael Crawford phantom movie campaign (oh yes, of which I was a passionate member) was adapted from the movie.

Anyway, I've made my boyfriend appreciate Doctor who, hooray! I started out with The empty child, and eventually he wanted to watch the whole series. He seems to enjoy Eccleston's Doctor, so I haven't had the heart to tell him he quit at the end of the season. And besides, it's better to be surprised I think.

Last night I spent over six hours working on sixteen cards. That's way too long. This work is getting harder every day, but at least I've done 3/4s. Clever me.

When I've finished reading Ivanhoe (which somehow translates as Idaho in my head), I'm thinking about reading something by Jane Austen. Just for the experience. There are fops in Jane Austen's stories, I hope?