By Jonathan Aaron
I'm cooking pasta and listening
to Richter playing Brahms's Second Piano Concerto.
My wife is watching television in the other room.
It's Johnny Depp, she calls out. Did he make a vampire movie?
Richter's piano teacher likened him to an eagle.
He flies at great heights, he said, and so can see the landscape
of music in all its vastness. Yet he has an unerring eye
for each and every detail. Oh! she calls again. There's
Gregory Peck! He looks like Abraham Lincoln.
How come he's in a boat?
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From this week's New Yorker. I really don't like this poem much, but I disliked the other one from this week even more -- self-absorbed pretentious crap -- and you can go read the year-end wrap-up poem there if you want.
Other than four loads of laundry that still aren't folded, my major task for Tuesday was getting a frame for the drawing by Lisa Hunt that I bought myself as a birthday present -- she's one of my favorite Tarot and Goddess artists (Celestial Goddesses, The Shapeshifter Tarot, The Fairy Tale Tarot) and was doing custom artwork for $25 which is less than many fan artists charge, so I asked whether she could draw a goddess or fairy at the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, with or without the Tor but definitely with the vesica piscis, and she gave me both! And it's big -- 10x13, meaning I had to do a bit of hunting for a frame since I can't afford a custom job, but Michael's had one, so it's all good!
Someone I didn't know e-mailed to remind me that the Kate Mulgrew Appreciation Society archive went down when Geocities went away and to ask whether she could post the Now Voyager newsletter issues on her own web site. I really didn't want to hand those files over to a stranger -- the person who ran the Geocities site was a staff member of KMAS back in the day, and though she's never been active on LiveJournal, we're friends on Facebook -- so I dug out the text files of the newsletters, swiped the index pages from the wayback engine, and now they're on my web site.
We watched Angels & Demons in the evening; I'd only seen it the one time in the theater, and I like it better than the book (less sexist, less racist, much less anti-Church, marginally better science, much more logical progression of events near the conclusion). I love the driving tour of Rome, the artwork, the construction of the interior of CERN, and I like a lot of the actors (McGregor, Zurer, Skarsgard, even Hanks, though whenever he is onscreen we all quote Epic Movie, "So lame the hair of Tom"). I prefer the conspiracy theory of The Da Vinci Code, but I also knew it in its entirety before Dan Brown got ahold of it, whereas I knew almost nothing about the Illuminati, so it's a fun plot for me.
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