Prime Suspect

My friend L recently loaned me Season 1 of Prime Suspect.  It's a BBC series about Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, which started in 1991.  The first six seasons ran from 1991 through 1996, and then it restarted again with another season in 2003, then one in 2006.  There has recently been a reboot called either Prime Suspect 1973 or Tennison, which is a flashback to the main character's early days on the police force.

About the main character, Ms. Tennison is played by the phenomenal Helen Mirren, who lives up to her reputation in this role.  The show has the expected issues of sexism from coworkers on the force, skeptical superiors, and a doubting public, but Mirren plays the role of the singularly-focused DCI without becoming too much of a stereotype.

I am looking forward to the remaining seasons, and excited to learn about the reboot.  I hope it matches the quality of the original!

Mountain Biking

S and I have been doing lots of mountain biking lately.  I use the word "mountain" loosely, since we live in the Midwest.  Trail biking?  Off-road biking?  Whatever.  One of those.  And it's been a blast.

If you need a good activity for a hot day, it's highly recommended!

Happy Birthday, America!

The Grapes of Wrath and The Trial

E and I had an opera spectacular, enjoying two shows in one day a couple of Saturdays ago.

We started with The Grapes of Wrath, which was first performed in 2007.  I was not crazy about the music, contemporary as it is.  The OTSL performance was the premiere of a new revised version of the show.  I didn't do enough research to know what the changes were, but one of the composers was there for the performance, and I suspect he was a speaker at an event either before or after the show talking about just that.

Though I didn't care for the music, I very much enjoyed the tragic story, which I had never encountered before, not having read the classic Steinbeck novel!  I definitely preferred Titus, but as between this and Butterfly, it's a bit of a toss-up.

After the matinee, E and I headed out for dinner with G&G at Peno.  It's a fairly new place just outside downtown Clayton, and I think we were all quite pleased with our meals.  E and I shared a pizza and a pasta, and other than about 3/4 of one of my pieces of pizza, we demolished them both.  G&G each had a variation on the fisherman's stew.  One of them polished it off, one of them took half home.  You decide.  We even had a couple of desserts; the lemon sorbet was delightful.

Then E and I headed back to the opera for Philip Glass's The Trial.  I really didn't know what to expect from this one.  Now I know.  Absurdism.  Although I can't really blame Philip Glass for that.  The opera is based on Franz Kafka's story of the same name, so the plot is his fault.

The music was less offensive to my ears than the music in Grapes had been, and I must agree with E that I very much enjoyed the monochromatic set of black, white, and grey.  But aside from that, just not my style.  Last place.

Goals 2017 -- July Edition

I'm cheating a bit by returning to a prior goal this month.  However, it will be a bit more ambitious, as I am adding to it.

Remember back in April how I was going to put together my crafting area?  And then how I didn't?  Well, I'm going for it again.

My rugs are still at the condo, but now that spring is over, hopefully I can find a non-rainy day in which to go pick them up and lay out the basement a bit differently than it is.

Where this gets more complicated is that, in order to do the above, I must also clean up the basement.  In the intervening months as I moved my stuff to S's house, we accumulated quite a mountain of stuff down there.  Some of the boxes are my stuff that I haven't even sorted through yet, but a lot of it is stuff he and I have gone through and decided to get rid of -- either because we have duplicates or because we just don't want or need it anymore.  It's all piled up down there right now, so I'm going to try to organize into toss/sell/donate categories, and to organize the yard sale stuff so it's easier to store until sale time.

That's ambitious, huh?

Goals 2017 -- June Recap

I had some goals for June related to work-life balance.  Here's how I did:

1. Have a talk with my boss about it (not for the first time).
Result: Done.  I think he finally took me seriously this time.  So far signs are good.  Remains to be seen whether they stick over time.

2. Plan my next vacation (S will probably do most of this, to be fair).
Result: S has made excellent progress planning our trip.  We have plane tickets and a plan of sorts.  Also a packing list.

3. Cook at least two dinners a week at home (real food -- not mac 'n cheese or pizza rolls).
Result: Cannot say that I did this.  I did cook more than last month, but not up to my goal yet.

4. Finish at least one book (though two would be great).
Result: One book completed!  I made little progress on any of my other books, but did get through a fair number of magazines that had been hanging around for a while.

Batting .750 will get me to the All-Star game.

Titus

My second opera of the season was Titus, one I had hardly heard of before this opera season.  S and I preceded the show with dinner at one of our favorite vegetarian spots, Frida's.  We got to the show early enough to have time for a cup of coffee!

Titus was great. In contrast to Butterfly, which was supposedly women-centric but reeked of desperation, Titus starred women almost all the lead roles, playing both women and men.  What a treat!

My favorite show of the season.

It's a convoluted tale of mixed-up love and loyalty, as so often happens in classic operas.  If you can put aside the slight ridiculousness of the story, it is easy to enjoy the beautiful Mozart music (and who doesn't love that?).  It was greatly helped by a serious of stellar performances by all those leading (wo)men.

The Winter's Tale

This year's Shakespeare Festival show was The Winter's Tale -- not one of his more popular plays.  I normally go see the show with G&G, but they opted out this year.  Failing my normal plans, I took advantage of the fact that my college alumni group and several of the local charitable organizations in which I participate were going on the same night.  Food and drink abounded!

The show itself was interesting, and a bit confusing.  It is a bit of a dramedy, as so many movies these days get categorized.  (Maybe this is just one more example of how Shakespeare was way ahead of his time.)

In a nutshell it goes like this:

Act I: King thinks Queen is cheating on him with King's Friend.  (She is not.)  Instead of poisoning King's Friend, King's Helper warns King's Friend of King's suspicions, and King's Friend escapes.  King's supposedly illegitimate infant daughter is banished, Queen dies, and Prince dies.  King realizes the error of his ways. 

Act II: Everyone is happy.  Dead Queen is still alive.  A bunch of people get married.

So...odd, right?  A plethora of accusations and death in Act I.  Raucous joyousness in Act II.  Despite the strange contradictions, it was an enjoyable show, in part because I had never seen it before.  And it was a beautiful night, so that's hard to beat!

The Cellist of Sarajevo -- Take 2

I finished up The Cellist of Sarajevo a couple of days ago.  I was five or six pages from the end when I put the book down on Saturday, but I was having a real bummer of a day on Sunday and didn't feel like it was a good time to finish what was shaping up to be a downer of a book.

And boy was I right.

The book is structured around four characters -- the Cellist, Dragan, Kenan, and Arrow.  The Cellist has the first chapter, in which you learn of his plan to play the same piece of music in the open air for twenty-two days to commemorate the deaths of that many people who were waiting in line for bread when they were killed.  The other three characters share the remaining chapters, and over the course of the book, you learn how the Cellist's decision to play his music affects or intersects with their lives.

The book is fiction, but based at least in part on real events, though compressed in time to make for better story-telling.

As with many books (or movies) which are told from different perspectives, as the reader (or viewer) you tend to identify with or care more for some characters than others.  So too here.

Bottom line: a bittersweet tale of a war-torn country, that somehow brings out the best in some people.

What I Watched -- Captain Fantastic

E recommended Captain Fantastic to me, because it stars Aragorn (aka Viggo Mortensen, but he will always be Aragorn to me).

Except in this movie.

But I loved it anyway!  It's the very odd story of a father and his six children, struggling with life and lifestyle and relationships with each other and the outside world.  It's clever and charming and sweet, sort of in the vein of Little Miss Sunshine, except without the kind of creepy grandfather figure (although there is a grandfather in this movie, but not a creepy one).  Royal Tenenbaums is another similarly strange family story.

Bottom line: if you're into quirky tales of family and people's wacky but wonderful lifestyle choices, you'll love it.