Chicago, Mark II
Sep. 8th, 2008 02:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ihrketayhl
I dunno what it is, but ever since I moved I've been noticing a lot more real-world things.
I mean, let's be honest here: I don't care as much as I should about the real world. I am thinking about stories most of the time, if I'm not writing them or reading them. Throughout most of school I could not get properly motivated to actually work for my grades, because I just didn't care (not that you can really tell; thank God for good cramming skills). Even this summer, when I was all like "SHIT SHIT I'M MOVING SHIT," I still didn't work that hard to find a job.
And I never knew my neighborhood that well, aside from where the good eating joints were; I knew downtown St. Louis even less, despite my university being pretty damn close to it.
But here, I'm like...out and about, and things. I can't stand staying inside all day (yes, that's odd for me, I know, sad); I love going places; I'm intensely interested in the city itself, what's there and how to get to it, making sure I learn something new every day. I introduced myself to my next-door neighbors who are just moving in today. And I've started reading a whole ton of political shit.
I don't know if it's a sign of my growing up, or if it's just that I have all of two friends out here and it makes me desperate to engage in conversation. It's very weird, though.
My emails are apparently not getting sent. This is distressing. It's never happened with my two main gmail accounts, that I know of, but this new one, my "professional" one, keeps not sending things. However, finding this out made me feel a little better about the lack of response I've been getting to my emails. Odds are only half of them sent! So it's not that people are just ignoring me, yay.
Now, have some random thoughts:
My roomies and I saw Wicked on Saturday, and I liked it a lot better than I did the first time. First time, I was blown away by the singing, but I was so irritated at the ending that I bitched about it most of the way home. For anyone who's seen Wicked: at the time, I thought the ending was too sappy. Easy. Whatever.
So this time, I'm watching it, and the Elphaba singer isn't as good as when we saw it the first time, but GLINDA is FANTASTIC. Which made me pay a lot more attention to her (even though Elphaba got better as it went on). And I realized two things about the musical, watching it this way.
1. The three mains are total morons. With Elphaba they do a pretty good job of making you think she's this clever little rebel (and she's very intelligent in the book, to be fair), but when you look at it objectively, she's very childish, easily manipulated, way too idealistic. She's naive.
Fiyero is just as stupid, but he's kind of a flat character, so this doesn't bother me as much.
Glinda is portrayed as the stupid one, which is funny, because other than Elphaba's bigger vocabulary, she and Elphie are about equal, IMO. They have different views on people, but they're both very simplistic views, and neither is canny enough to figure out that the Wizard is a total douche until he's already screwed them over.
And I guess I might be being too cynical--it's not necessarily that they come off as stupid, but they do come off as young. Idealistic, again!
2. The ending is not actually that happy.
I mean, I was disappointed originally because I was expecting Elphie to die, and she didn't. Fine, whatever, insert idiot rage here.
She's stuck forever with a scarecrow. Her best friend isn't allowed to know she's alive. She's basically got to live even more suppressed than she did in the course of the play; yeah, she has Fiyero, but...again...scarecrow. So her lot sucks.
Fiyero is a scarecrow. The poor bastard probably never even lost his virginity.
And Glinda! Glinda. HER lot just sucks balls. Yeah, everyone loves her and thinks she's awesome, but she's aware that her entire society is basically built on lies etc etc, and the two people she loves most in the world run off without her. She doesn't even really get resolution with Fiyero, and she only barely gets it with Elphie.
IT IS A THOROUGHLY DEPRESSING ENDING. Which makes me like it a lot better. :)
So I've been downloading a lot of movie soundtracks lately. Has anyone else noticed that A LOT of movies will have this ONE theme that's just repeated, over and over and over, in like five different tracks? Are composers really allowed to do that? I mean, hell, the guy who did the music for Crisis Core basically just came up with that one riff and it's in every. Single. Track. and this sort of makes me wonder, seriously, is it easy to be a movie composer? Is it easier than being just a freelance...whatever...whatever the hell Jim Brickman is, or David Lanz, someone who's just composing music for the hell of it. Because, I mean, if David Lanz just repeated the same theme over and over, I know I wouldn't be buying his music.
Yet here I have the Dragonheart soundtrack, and I swear I can't go two minutes without hearing that DA-da-DAAAAAAA-daa stupid thing that everyone knows because a jillion movie trailers ripped it off (seriously, you might not know it's from Dragonheart, but you'd know it if you heard it).
Clearly, I should pursue a career in writing music for movies. I mean, all I need is one good theme; surely that can't be that difficult.
Can we see that the unemployment is starting to eat at my sanity, YES WE CAN.
In further news, Venture Bros. is fucking awesome.
I mean, let's be honest here: I don't care as much as I should about the real world. I am thinking about stories most of the time, if I'm not writing them or reading them. Throughout most of school I could not get properly motivated to actually work for my grades, because I just didn't care (not that you can really tell; thank God for good cramming skills). Even this summer, when I was all like "SHIT SHIT I'M MOVING SHIT," I still didn't work that hard to find a job.
And I never knew my neighborhood that well, aside from where the good eating joints were; I knew downtown St. Louis even less, despite my university being pretty damn close to it.
But here, I'm like...out and about, and things. I can't stand staying inside all day (yes, that's odd for me, I know, sad); I love going places; I'm intensely interested in the city itself, what's there and how to get to it, making sure I learn something new every day. I introduced myself to my next-door neighbors who are just moving in today. And I've started reading a whole ton of political shit.
I don't know if it's a sign of my growing up, or if it's just that I have all of two friends out here and it makes me desperate to engage in conversation. It's very weird, though.
My emails are apparently not getting sent. This is distressing. It's never happened with my two main gmail accounts, that I know of, but this new one, my "professional" one, keeps not sending things. However, finding this out made me feel a little better about the lack of response I've been getting to my emails. Odds are only half of them sent! So it's not that people are just ignoring me, yay.
Now, have some random thoughts:
My roomies and I saw Wicked on Saturday, and I liked it a lot better than I did the first time. First time, I was blown away by the singing, but I was so irritated at the ending that I bitched about it most of the way home. For anyone who's seen Wicked: at the time, I thought the ending was too sappy. Easy. Whatever.
So this time, I'm watching it, and the Elphaba singer isn't as good as when we saw it the first time, but GLINDA is FANTASTIC. Which made me pay a lot more attention to her (even though Elphaba got better as it went on). And I realized two things about the musical, watching it this way.
1. The three mains are total morons. With Elphaba they do a pretty good job of making you think she's this clever little rebel (and she's very intelligent in the book, to be fair), but when you look at it objectively, she's very childish, easily manipulated, way too idealistic. She's naive.
Fiyero is just as stupid, but he's kind of a flat character, so this doesn't bother me as much.
Glinda is portrayed as the stupid one, which is funny, because other than Elphaba's bigger vocabulary, she and Elphie are about equal, IMO. They have different views on people, but they're both very simplistic views, and neither is canny enough to figure out that the Wizard is a total douche until he's already screwed them over.
And I guess I might be being too cynical--it's not necessarily that they come off as stupid, but they do come off as young. Idealistic, again!
2. The ending is not actually that happy.
I mean, I was disappointed originally because I was expecting Elphie to die, and she didn't. Fine, whatever, insert idiot rage here.
She's stuck forever with a scarecrow. Her best friend isn't allowed to know she's alive. She's basically got to live even more suppressed than she did in the course of the play; yeah, she has Fiyero, but...again...scarecrow. So her lot sucks.
Fiyero is a scarecrow. The poor bastard probably never even lost his virginity.
And Glinda! Glinda. HER lot just sucks balls. Yeah, everyone loves her and thinks she's awesome, but she's aware that her entire society is basically built on lies etc etc, and the two people she loves most in the world run off without her. She doesn't even really get resolution with Fiyero, and she only barely gets it with Elphie.
IT IS A THOROUGHLY DEPRESSING ENDING. Which makes me like it a lot better. :)
So I've been downloading a lot of movie soundtracks lately. Has anyone else noticed that A LOT of movies will have this ONE theme that's just repeated, over and over and over, in like five different tracks? Are composers really allowed to do that? I mean, hell, the guy who did the music for Crisis Core basically just came up with that one riff and it's in every. Single. Track. and this sort of makes me wonder, seriously, is it easy to be a movie composer? Is it easier than being just a freelance...whatever...whatever the hell Jim Brickman is, or David Lanz, someone who's just composing music for the hell of it. Because, I mean, if David Lanz just repeated the same theme over and over, I know I wouldn't be buying his music.
Yet here I have the Dragonheart soundtrack, and I swear I can't go two minutes without hearing that DA-da-DAAAAAAA-daa stupid thing that everyone knows because a jillion movie trailers ripped it off (seriously, you might not know it's from Dragonheart, but you'd know it if you heard it).
Clearly, I should pursue a career in writing music for movies. I mean, all I need is one good theme; surely that can't be that difficult.
Can we see that the unemployment is starting to eat at my sanity, YES WE CAN.
In further news, Venture Bros. is fucking awesome.