weekend: Saturday

Last week I had a dream where someone cut off all my hair, and I was really really upset because I'd wanted to have it long for my wedding. (I do really need a haircut, though.)

Saturday was a really nice day. F and I met up with my parents, F's parents, F's Uncle Jim, and F's Aunt Ambry, Uncle Jerry, and cousin David, to give everybody a tour of the college campus where F now works. We were worried it might rain, but the weather turned out to be gorgeous. We met everyone at the train station, and then walked over to show the exterior of our new apartment--but we ran into the previous/current tenant, who was stopping by to pick up a few things, and he graciously let us in so our families could look around. The new apartment received Momproval from both sides. Then we walked up to campus and F gave a nice tour. He included on his tour normal stuff, like his building and his office, and also pretty places--the campus is an arboretum--and possible wedding spaces. I'm now really liking the idea of having the wedding on the campus. There are some really cool spaces and I can picture how nice it would be. So that was exciting. We still have more research to do, though. After walking around campus, we drove over to Media for lunch at the Iron Hill Brewery. I had planned ahead and made reservations for ten--go me.

And then I went home and read my book for most of the rest of the day, except for when I ate two vegetarian corn dogs for dinner and watched The Mummy: Curse of the Dragon Emperor. It was a very silly movie, and it bothered me that they found some other chick to play Evie (why not just kill her off?), but there were some cool effects. I liked the yeti, and the final battle (which was the whole point of the movie anyway). Overall it was a fun movie to watch. I'm tentatively looking forward to the unavoidable next installment, to be set in Peru.

Ballet update

On Sunday, I went to the ballet with Mom. I haven't been posting my ballet reviews at all this year, which is completely lame of me. I haven't posted a ballet review since last June. Well, we've still been going to the ballet. Here's a brief recap of what we've seen so far:

There was one performance in the fall--George Balanchine and Twyla Tharp. We hate Balanchine, so that wasn't much to get excited about. Balanchine is really the sort of thing only dancers like, I think. I bet he was really revolutionary fifty years ago, but now he's just boring. It's all very pretty--pretty classical music, pretty dancers doing pretty dances in pretty white dresses--but it's boring. Maybe it's technically difficult, but to the non-dance audience it's just boring. I think we liked the middle piece, but I can't remember what we thought of Tharp.

We saw Love & Longing in February. The middle piece, Requiem for a Rose, we thought was really weird, but we liked the nine Sinatra songs. We enjoyed the costumes particularly.

They did Cinderella in March. This was pretty much what you'd expect, pleasant and fun. Afterwards, we were walking down a side street and saw a man and his little daughter, and also saw a young woman who looked like she might've been a dancer--face all made up, hair still up in a bun, etc. The little girl spotted the dancer and her eyes got all big and she whispered to her dad. The dad said, "I don't know, why don't you ask her?" and the little girl went over and talked to the dancer, and the dancer was really really nice. Mom and I liked that.

Yesterday, we saw Tango with Style, which we were really looking forward to. There were three separate individual pieces, with the actual Tango piece last. The first piece was very much like Balanchine, pretty with dancers in white dresses, and therefore dead boring. The second piece was an original by Matthew Neenan, the PA Ballet choreographer-in-residence. We usually really enjoy Neenan's work, and this was no exception. Neenan's pieces always involve a lot of play with color and light and interesting costumes; the dancers are always performing movements that seem odd or awkward or just different from the traditional. Seeing a Neenan piece right after something so Balanchinely really highlighted why we like Neenan so much. It also seems to me that the dancers must like Neenan's work too--the dancing seems so much more passionate, more raw and emotional, than in those pretty little pieces.

The final piece, the Tango with Style, was really weird and kind of disappointing. We had been so looking forward to it, but it was not really tango-like at all. Mom said she thought it was more like 1920s French jazz. The only thing Spanishy about it was that all the female dancers wore a red flower in their hair. The only part that really caught me was the third movement, when two male dancers were on the stage together. Their dance was both competitive and erotic. Then their female partners took the stage, and I jokingly whispered to Mom, "They don't seem to know their boyfriends are dancing together when they're not around", but as we watched it did seem like the choreographer was playing with that sort of tension. There were moments when the two men made extended eye contact while dancing with the women, who were looking away. It was kind of intense and fascinating. Otherwise, though, we didn't really love the Tango with Style. Also odd was that there was no description in the program of the three ballets we were seeing that day--usually there is a description of each, what inspired the choreographer, when it was written, etc, and I like reading about them, but there wasn't a description this time. Odd.

We had some problems with our seats at the Academy this year. Last year, we were really unhappy with our seats at the Academy, so we requested new seats for this year. When we got to the Academy, our new seats were completely behind a pole. We were really upset. We requested new seats, and the new seats were off to the extreme right of the stage, so bad that we literally couldn't see half the stage. That day, we just got up and moved up to the second balcony and found empty seats there, and that was much better. When Mom called to complain about the seat problem, she was told that there wasn't anything they could do about it. Mom's like, "OK, I could walk in off the street five minutes before the performance and buy tickets for better seats at a better price, so tell me again what the benefit is of being a subscriber?" They eventually moved us up to the second balcony to seats that we like a lot, but the whole thing was very frustrating. And then Mom got the subscription renewal form in the mail, and it had our old, way off to the side seats on it. So, frustrating.

Added to that, next season they're not doing anything we really want to see. They're redoing Carmina Burana, which they just did in 2007--we really liked it last time, and in fact that was what inspired us to get season tickets in the first place, but dude, come on, they just freakin' did it two years ago. They're also redoing Requiem for a Rose, which we didn't like already this February, and it looks like there's a lot of Balanchine too. The only thing we actually want to see is Romeo and Juliet in June, and we don't need to subscribe to go to see one performance. If we hadn't had the seating and customer service problems, we might consider it anyway, but as it is--um, no. So we are canceling our ballet subscription for next year.

Instead, we are getting a subscription to the opera for next season! The price is comparable, and we are genuinely excited about most of the shows they're doing. So that's exciting. No news yet on what our seats will be like at the opera, but here's hoping.

books 2009: Unholy Business, by Nina Burleigh

Full title: Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed & Forgery in the Holy Land. Nonfiction, about the James Ossuary, an artifact recently discovered in Israel but which has now been rumored to be a forgery.

I don't know, this was an odd book. Maybe because Burleigh is a journalist? She's trying to write a captivating, exciting story about the underground artifact trade, but I don't know that she's going about it the right way. She skips back and forth in time, so that I don't feel I have a clear picture of who saw the artifact when and what the chain of events was--even though the chapters are ostensibly organized by date, I didn't get a sense of that as I read, and I'm only seeing now that most chapters are labeled by date. The skips in time don't help her, either--she'll describe her own visit to interview a scholar, but then won't come back around to that scholar again for another 50 pages, when we've forgotten the name of this person and we don't connect that lady with all the cats to the person whose opinion on the artifact is being cited.

Burleigh also seems to want to write this as "creative nonfiction" rather than journalism--in one chapter, Burleigh gives a three-page account of getting stuck in traffic in Jerusalem in 2007, which is completely unrelated to anything else that happened in the chapter. Burleigh is trying to make the point that everything in the city hinges on the religious life (which was in an uproar at the time, hence the traffic), but she makes that point repeatedly elsewhere in the book. I was thinking that the chapter would then go on to talk about who she saw or talked to on that 2007 trip, but no. The logic she uses to connect her narrative together is thin. I'm not saying she didn't do exhaustive research, but she just doesn't seem to present it well in a cohesive narrative.

Burleigh would have been better served to have written this in a more scholarly format, I think. A chapter specifically on the patina controversy, for example, contrasting the differing viewpoints, rather than having that information scattered about in her various interviews with the scholars. Even if Burleigh had just pulled her own perspective out more, it might have been a better book--the time skipping confusion, I think, is caused by the fact that she's interviewing people in 2007, which I as the reader do not need to know at all to understand the story, but it's in there. Her physical descriptions of the people were kind of interesting, but I'm not going to remember later which lady had the cats and which guy looked like the monopoly banker. As it was, the book seemed like an uncomfortable mesh of 3rd person objective journalism with some 1st person subjective narrative thrown in, and I don't think the material warranted that.

Also, I am a bit confused by the fact that she wrote this book before the Israeli court case about the forgery had been concluded. The ending seemed a bit rushed, because the end hadn't happened yet. Why not wait a few years until you actually have a conclusion?

Interesting material, but overall, didn't love this one.