Saturday, May 30, 2009

Poem for Saturday

Preludes for Prepared Piano 4: Lady Mac
By Estill Pollock


Attention all hipsters,
hepcats, swingers, a new and foreign reality.

What, in our house?
A test, to tell whether your mission
on earth is finished, the soldiers of Malcolm
attack Macbeth, camouflages with coppers
in the trees of Birnam forest.

I went to Macbeth with Marisa, this girl who goes to Muir
who random IQ'd me.
It was a pretty good show, but as I heard from people
in my acting class, the costumes were horrible.
Being queen
isn't as much fun as she thought.

So much blood, poor self-talk, like that of most of us,
doomed,
your own degrees incremental, this haunting
echo of false steps, then
I turn the word, neuter penetrating

sleeplessness.

--------

Duke Ellington's "Such Sweet Thunder" -- a montage based on Shakespeare characters -- was created for the Stratford Festival, the same festival upon which the Burbage Festival in Slings & Arrows was based. I've posted many parts of Pollock's sonnet cycle based on it before, but I was in the mood for it tonight, being sad at having no more episodes to watch.

The major event of my day was taking the Two Most Woeful Beings in the Universe (TM) to the vet. Rosie had been quite ill a few days ago -- we're still not sure why, but she spent all day sick to her stomach and eventually hid under the dining room table, mewling piteously, which is so unlike her that I called emergency care, though they said to see how she was doing a bit later and by then she was up and whining for food like her usual self. Turns out she has a badly abscessed tooth that must be pulled on Monday, meaning that once again all three cats can't be fed after midnight (since it's impossible to keep Rosie out of anyone else's dish) and there will be pathetic whimpering and feigned near-death flopping on the couch. If you hear Cinnamon meowing from where you are, which is not impossible -- the veterinary staff were quite amused at how LOUD she is when being tortured for bloodwork etc. -- please don't call the humane society, as they will just put her in another car carrier and start the cycle of misery all over.


The Most Woeful Beings in the Universe in the vet's waiting room.


After being weighed, Rosie tries to figure out a way to get back into her carrier to hide.


Cinnamon is forced to submit to the indignity of an oral exam.


Meanwhile Rosie must hold still and, more importantly, stop meowing so the vet can listen to her heart.


Plus she has to put up with having her eyes examined.


Leaping from the high exam table does not give Cinnamon a way out of the room, much to her regret.


Finally, the two cats who complained bitterly a couple of hours earlier about being put into carriers are very happy to be back inside them.


Meanwhile, at home, Daisy is faced with an empty house for the first time ever and is thus equally traumatized.


Next Gen review will be finished tomorrow since I didn't want to rush "Ensign Ro" and none of the news editors ever gets a link posted to TrekToday on Friday night anyway. (Robin West shared this article about the new movie with me; it is sure to piss someone off but the subject matter naturally caught my attention, though I didn't see the movie so I have no opinion on whether this is, in fact, a fair or unfair assessment.) But in the unpopular opinions department, we did watch Prince Caspian, which didn't impress me at all. I thought the acting was uniformly much worse than the first film (even the Javier Bardem lookalike whom I thought was Javier Bardem in Angels & Demons till I saw him again here); the battles went on much too long and were much too reminiscent of much better ones in Return of the King, Kingdom of Heaven, and even the much-ridiculed Willow; the changes in the story were unnecessarily confusing and lent themselves to more violence than necessary; and the endless "only Aslan can save us" stuff from Lucy really got on my nerves. I'm afraid to see how these people do Dawn Treader, my favorite of the books.

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