Potter rerun

I just finished rereading the Harry Potter series. It took under a month, and most of that was spent reading two of the book (Order of the Phoenix and Deathly Hallows). And the thing that really blew me away was how incredibly tight the series is. The old adage is that if you see a gun in Act One, it's going to go off in Act Three. That was just all over the place. The smallest thread from a book very well might show up two books later. I remember reading Goblet of Fire and being bored with the whole house elf subplot, but the actions of house elves--responses to how they were treated--were crucial in Phoenix and Hallows. The author of a textbook we first see in Sorcerer's Stone is a point in Hallows. Even the Time Turners from Prisoner of Azkaban are specifically destroyed in Phoenix so they can't be a plot point later. Reading it, over and over I'd encounter a name or a curse or an incident from a previous book and it was just exactly where it needed to be.

It's just really good to see. Rowling obviously plotted these things out incredibly before setting pen to paper for Sorcerer's Stone. There are stories of people asking her questions about some random character, and she'll give a detailed answer. It's clear that her knowledge of this world and the people in it extends far deeper than what she included in the books.

Which makes the epilogue of Hallows that much more frustrating. It annoyed me then, it annoys me now. I should not have to have read in an interview with Rowling a week after the book came out what Harry and his buds had chosen for careers. According to Rowling, "It would have been humanly impossible to answer every single question that comes up." Well, that's true. But I wasn't asking the names of Harry's great-great-grandparents. I just wanted to know his job. That information is WAY more interesting than the names of his kids, and Ron and Hermione's kids, and even Bill and Fleur's kids. Good Lord, woman. We learn that. And we learn that Neville is a professor at Hogwarts. Yeah, that isn't what I wanted to learn in the epilogue. Harry and Ron revolutionized the Auror Department? That's awesome! How? What did they do? Even just a hint would be better than them seeing each other at Platform 9 3/4.

(I won't get into Harry and Ginny. Let's just say that I don't feel it in the books or the movies. Even a little.)

Still, it's hard to quibble with a few missteps when literally thousands of pages are so good. I mean, I found it hard to put the books down, even having read all of them before--some of them quite a few times. Kudos to you, Ms Rowling, and I look forward to you releasing the Potter encyclopedia.

Hippity hop

So I was visiting Becca last weekend, and we found ourselves sitting outside a bar on Saturday night chatting. We gradually noticed the total awesomeness of the songs being played--"Humpty Dance," "Baby Got Back," "You Say He's Just a Friend," and so on. Naturally this led to us compiling a list of songs that need to be on this mix. But I'm opening this up to the public--what songs are we missing? And do you want to send me the songs I don't have? (The ones I do have are marked by an X.) Because putting together this mix is going to cost, like, $25, and that sucks. And I refuse on principle to pay for "Me So Horny."

1. Humpty Dance
2. It's Tricky - X
3. Push It
4. Baby Got Back
5. Funky Cold Medina - X
6. Say He's Just a Friend
7. Gettin' Jiggy
8. Shoop
9. Girls
10. Walk This Way (Run DMC)
11. Never Gonna Get It - X
12. Jump Around - X
13. The Dinosaur - X
14. Informer
15. Wasn't Me - X
16. Bombastic
17. 2legit
18. Me So Horny
19. Da Butt
20. Bust a Move
21. OPP
22. Ice Ice Baby
23. I got a man (Positive K)
24. Back to Cali
25. I'm Gonna Knock You Out
26. Boom (Shake the Room) - X
27. Good Vibrations (Marky Mark)
28. Back to Life (Soul II Soul)
29. Motownphilly (Boyz II Men)
30. Jump (Kriss Kross)
31. Strike It Up (Black Box)
32. My Perogative
33. Poison (Bel Biv Devoe)
34. No Diggity

(Cross-posted to my other blog)

Julie, Julia, and Barb

I read Julie & Julia at Christmas last year and quite enjoyed it; it amused me throughout my 24-hour trek to Oregon when I definitely needed the distraction. I was excited for the movie--after all, I liked the source material, and it stars Amy Adams and Meryl Streep! And I did enjoy the movie; more, in fact, than most critics.

The biggest criticism about the movie seems to be that the parts about Julie, the young woman in 2002 who goes through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blogs about it, drag. People seem to see her as whiny and find those parts boring; a number would rather just watch a movie with Meryl Streep as Julia Child. Which I might agree with, were the parts in the movie about Julia Child when she worked for the OSS during World War II and not about her learning to cook and attempting to write a cookbook. Meryl Streep was great, of course, and I enjoyed those parts of the movie, but I didn't find them as riveting as I guess a lot of other people.

Maybe it's that I can relate a lot more to Julie than Julia. Whiny? Not particularly. I haven't encountered the scorn of the cubicle that she did and I'm not surrounded by wildly successful friends, but I'm also someone who finds refuge outside of work. It was nice to see a character in a solid relationship, but we also got to see how her drive to get through the cookbook put a strain on that relationship. She came across as eminently human, which isn't necessarily the case with Julia.

One of the biggest contradictions--and one that cannot be explained--is that Julia Child did not appreciate what Julie Powell did. Both the movie and the book include the moment that Julie finds out that Julia didn't think Julie was being "respectful", whatever that means. But the Julia portrayed by Meryl Streep seems to have a sense of humor. True, by that point she was much, much older, and possibly not that familiar with blogs, and she had lost her husband. But the movie doesn't really show Julia as someone with flaws, whereas Julie is definitely flawed.

It's interesting, because in the book Julie & Julia, the Julia parts are weaker by far; Julie does much better writing about herself. But on the other hand, the sections in the book also show Julia and Paul meeting and marrying during the war, so the story (to me) was more interesting than the one in the movie. Obviously, though, Julia learning to cook and writing the book are more pertinent to the movie's story.

In any case, the movie was delightful--all of it. Now, who's up for a cupcake?

Haven't forgotten about him yet

Just a quick post (because I'm tired, yo) to link to this article by a guy who went to school with John Hughes and had some Ferris-like adventures. And since I'm linking, I might as well post one to the op-ed Molly Ringwald wrote about Hughes. Because I remain fascinated by my youth. And when I hit play on a tape that's been in my tape deck for ages, it started playing "Don't You (Forget About Me)".

More recognition for the Sig

The first show I saw at the Signature was Assassins. I loved it, loved the actors, loved the theater. I had told myself I should see more theater around here, since DC has a really vibrant theater scene, and I was making an effort to go somewhere other than the National and the Kennedy Center. But instead of proceeding to Arena or the Folger or Woolly Mammoth or any of the many others (though I should point out that I have managed to visit a lot of the theaters now), I just kept going back to the Signature. My Fair Lady. Into the Woods. Merrily We Roll Along. Kiss of the Spider Woman. And so on. They do a lot of musicals, which is right up my alley, and I love a lot of the actors who pop up again and again in Signature shows. I'm super excited to see [title of show] and Sweeney Todd this season. Really, I just need to start ushering there. It's a bit of a drive, but would save me a bunch of money.

Anyway, I was psyched when they won the regional Tony this year, and now there's a nice article in the NY Times. I'm just bummed I had to miss the open house yesterday, as I was being a dork and volunteering at Ford's.

Now I just have to figure out how to become BFF with some of the regular cast members...I'm cool, guys! Hang out with me!

From "Rainbow Connection" to "Don't You Forget About Me"

One of the first things I thought of after hearing that John Hughes died was, oddly enough, Jim Henson's death. I've been mulling over why this was (other than the obvious connection that they were both J.H.). And I think it's a symbol of teen years being over, where Henson's death was a loss of my childhood. Of course, when Hughes's seminal work came out in the 80s--Breakfast Club, 16 Candles, Pretty in Pink, Weird Science--I wasn't even 10. But those movies speak to all teenagers; those teenagers were the people I looked up to, in a way. They were who I thought teenagers were supposed to be.

The movies are endlessly quotable, but it's true what countless other people are saying--he understood teenagers. Probably the line that sticks with me the most is from 16 Candles: "That's why they're called crushes. If they were easy, they'd be called something else."

RIP, John Hughes.