"Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That's why it's good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower. 'Lead us not into temptation.'" Joseph Campbell
I got up from my usual 8PM nap and found this parked on the wall of my kitchen.
Mothra.
It wasn't as colorful, but only radioactivity could have made a moth as long as my finger. Luckily the one kind of bug my two girls can be relied on to not only hunt, but to eat, is moths. It can be hard to point out a bug to cats, but I felt certain I'd succeed.
I wiggled my fingers towards it and Haley, the superior moth hunter (she learned from dear departed Nombly, who was an anxious Woody Allen sort of cat, but the Great Moth Hunter as well as Haley's sensei) and she immediately made: eh eh eh eh! noises.
I lifted Minion up and she immediately spotted... the spider crawling as fast as it could across the ceiling away from Mothra.
"Not the spider, dummy, THAT way."
Then she got it. "RWA RWA RWA RWA!" That means "let me at 'em let me at 'em!" She jumped onto the shelf nearest Mothra and tried climbing over the tupperware with my water bottles in it, but soon had to jump down.
Haley was still surveying the landscape, knowing that it was too rickety up there.
I quickly pulled down my bins. The way was clear, but maybe still too low. I put up a small firm plastic box and Haley was up on it before Minion knew what had happened.
At this point I was also cowering behind the doorway because moths, of course, can fly.
Haley made her first attack. The moth flew towards the other set of shelves. I flew down the the hallway.
When next I peeked down the hallway, Haley was crouched in the shadows, munching away, Minion standing admiringly at her elbow.
It took less than a minute.
How she caught that fricking thing when last I saw it, it was sailing 6 feet over head, high above the cereal boxes, I do not know. But Haley has earned a new nickname...
My blogging might return to some normalcy this week. ... I didn't think the Prince concert brain breakdown would be this productive, but I've already written up several posts that I'm all mustsharemustsharemustshare. As well as linking all kinds of things on facebook that could have become posts. And storing up things to my comments blogs. Seems like one little part of my brain has cleared, but who knows, it might not last. I'm not counting any chickadees.
I don't have any kitty pics this week I'm afraid. Just this...
Fernando felt like seeing a movie Thursday night, since it's a long weekend for him. We rushed off to try and catch Transformers 3--his fave childhood series.
We got the right bus, so were in plenty of time. As we sauntered through the door we saw a poster for this:
Cineplex sometimes shows operas and theatre pieces from Stratford and the National Theatre.
Last year Fernando agreed to come see Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra with me, with Christopher Plummer, which was wonderful. But it's not something I'd expect him to agree to on a whim. He enjoys literature, but not necessarily when he's in the mood for transforming robot adventure.
Me: Oh it's one of those plays--playing today I guess.
F: Let's go see it."
[pausing at the doors]
M: You want to see The Cherry Orchard instead of Transformers.
F: It's Chekhov.
M: And you want to see him now, tonight.
F: What's wrong with you? It's Chekhov!
M: You want to see Chekhov instead of Transformers?
F: I've read and seen The Cherry Orchard two or three times. It's Chekhov!
M: And you want to see it again. Tonight.
F: Yes.
M: Instead of Transformers.
F: It's Chekhov!!
So we saw Chekhov, and my husband can still surprise me after 18 years.
I love plays so I've always wanted to read or see him, but I've always been putting him off because of the depression factor. Oh. My. Days. I was, like, blown back against my chair. What a play. So sad that they only do the National Theatre showings on one date (Stratford ones are sometimes on more than one day) cause I can't recommend it to you guys!
So many different emotions, so much going on, so much tension, so much intensity. Gasp!!
Zoë Wannamaker was so powerful! Oh my days my days. I couldn't remember where I'd seen her (Harry Potter, and Agatha Christie adaptations) because I was so completely immersed in her story of this woman whose childhood home and estate is threatened with foreclosure. Lady Andreyevna reminded me of Dickens' Lady Dedlock, and Gaskell's Lady Ludlow...
...aristocratic women so firmly trapped in their situations that even when an escape hatch is opened to them, you're afraid they're just going to go down with the ship. And that's where all the tension is. Like watching Holly Hunter at the end of The Piano, waiting to see if she'll free herself from her shackle in time, or just let herself drown.
A couple weeks ago I watched Harold Lloyd's Safety Last! for the first time ever, and man does it ever stand up over time. The climax of the story is that he his character has to climb the side of a 12 story building in order to win enough money to marry his sweetheart, to whom he's passionately devoted. I'd just been reading Maas' advice about how to build suspense in a novel, and watching this scene is like the dictionary definition of building suspense for genre stories. Lloyd makes his character suffer. Everything that can go wrong goes wrong. And in original, creative ways. A dog chase on the side of a building? Gun shots? Getting electrocuted? Fear of heights is only the start.
But Maas also talks about building suspense in literary novels, and The Cherry Orchard provides a perfect companion to Lloyd's movie. It isn't full of surprise plot twists and skeletons in the closet and the sudden revelation that the butler is actually the duke's bastard child. It's just a house full of characters--their dreams and ideals and histories and pains and sorrows and their love. And that's what creates the suspense and drives the plot.
The climax of the play was so harrowing, I was almost clutching my gut in pain. And during the climax of Lloyd's movie I was clapping with delight like a hyper child.
I just watched Nicki Minaj's last video "Super Bass" and I noticed something interesting. Her backup dancers aren't stick-thin. And not just that, they aren't all what you might call "traditionally hot" for lack of a better term. You don't have to watch the video, just go below for pics...
The women in the video look so different from the usual backup dancers in videos, that something felt "off" about the video as soon as I started watching it. Part of it is that they're wearing wigs, but that just highlights that I think these women weren't chosen for their looks. Because while Minaj and some of the dancers (for example perhaps the one on the far right in the pic below) looks very pretty in the wig, some of the other women verge on the transsexual. And the comments on youtube reflect that ("Nicki's dancers are all men!")
Honestly, I thought at least one of them was a man myself, because that seemed like the sort of interesting thing Nicki Minaj would do! But as the internets made no note of it, I knew that couldn't be the case. The first time a high profile star hires a cross-dressed man to dance in their backup line, they're going to publicize that.
But no, these are Minaj's usual dancers--you can recognize them from other stage shows on youtube.
They're of course thin, but you can easily pick out Minaj's torso in this line-up.
I'm not the best observer of this, but a lot of these women might be darker than the average African-American backup video dancer. In any case there's a variety of skin tones, which I seriously doubt happened by accident.
They're also in Doc Martens, which makes this traditional "sexy dance pose" come off completely different than it usually would even with their short shorts and their push up bras.
I tried to find a random dance video to compare this with, out of what's popular right now. It was hard because Billboard's top spots are dominated by women right now, but here's Jason Derulo's recent "Don't Wanna Go Home".
Gorgeous skinny light skinned woman.
Gorgeous skinny lighter skinned woman.
Gorgeous skinny white women.
(But don't get me wrong, the women are great dancers.)
The only "traditional" sex objects in the video are herself, and her male models.
All of this is made that much more interesting by the fact that Minaj calls herself and her fans and I assume her dancers: Barbies--a nickname she didn't pick, but that she eventually adopted. The only way in which Minaj looks like a Barbie is in her tiny waist and her boobs--the backup dancers even less so.
There's some serious Barbie subversion going on here... and I like it.
Side note: Though Nicki wears some wicked high heels in her appearances, I've noticed that in these concerts--which I assume are longer--she and her dancers wear kitten heels or flats.
For example for one song she's in these:
While her dancers are in these:
But usually they're in flat boots.
Here's some more pictures of her dancers from various live performances. (Some are grainy cause they're screen shots I took from videos.)
