![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
But mortals, as you may have noticed, take what they can get
So this has been, actually, a very good couple of days. On Thursday, my dear friend without a livejournal came up to Boston for the day. He now lives in Vancouver; we had not seen one another since July; we spent the day walking around Lexington, with a brief flyby into Harvard Square, and in the evening went to the ICA to see Der Purimshpiler (1937), which we loved.1 It's an odd film, a musical tragicomedy set in a Galician shtetl just prior to World War I. Its hero, Getzel, is an itinerant Purim player, Ahasuerus on the 14th of Adar and a jack-of-all-trades and sometime beggar the rest of the year—a tall, shy, gently beaky shlimazl with a silent clown's gift for hopeless love. He glimpses a beautiful girl singing in an apple orchard, takes work with the shtetl's shoemaker when he discovers she's the daughter of the house.2 For a little while, everyone's fortunes rise. But when Esther asks Getzel to run away with her, it is not going to end well for him. It's that kind of story. (Yes, of course I'm going to screen this for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving.) The two speakers afterward made a point of the film's ethnographic aspects, like the fact that it was shot on location in Kazimierz and all the extras actually lived there; it is not a documentary, but it has that memorial quality for an audience who knows that within two years of the film's release, its world had disappeared. The Purim sequence is just about our only recording of a traditional Purimspiel in the wild. I don't know why there isn't more exploration of cinema as an inherently haunted medium: in the end, it all comes down to ghosts playing in the dark. I wonder if even the apple orchard is still there.
Yesterday, meanwhile, in another world altogether, Viking Zen and I watched the first seven episodes of the second season of Avatar and wow. The new characters and developments deserve their own post, but may I just put in:yhlee, will you not take it as calumny if I bet that a certain lightning-wielding sociopath is dear to your heart? And someone please tell me that Zuko is not about to pull a Londo Mollari, because I have become rather fond of him. Uncle Iroh maintains awesome.
And I should really leave, if I want to make tonight's peformance of Coriolanus by the Actors' Shakespeare Project. I have never seen a production, their Duchess of Malfi blew me away, and my college roommate is assistant-directing, so I think it should be good. Reports when I return.
1. The only downside was the three kids behind us who kept laughing in all the wrong places. I don't know who goes to see a seventy-two-year-old foreign-language film just to make fun of the production values and the acting style, but I wish they wouldn't.
2. On a note of random genetic diversity, it was really neat to see a film in which the beautiful people did not look like everyone in Hollywood and were never intended to. Miriam Kressyn has a classical soprano and a song-and-dancer's grace of movement; she is idealized and adored by the camera and she would never be mistaken for someone whose family came from Dublin or Lyons, unless they had come from Poland first. She's lovely. This is awesome. Don't get me started on the live-action Avatar casting.
nineweaving.) The two speakers afterward made a point of the film's ethnographic aspects, like the fact that it was shot on location in Kazimierz and all the extras actually lived there; it is not a documentary, but it has that memorial quality for an audience who knows that within two years of the film's release, its world had disappeared. The Purim sequence is just about our only recording of a traditional Purimspiel in the wild. I don't know why there isn't more exploration of cinema as an inherently haunted medium: in the end, it all comes down to ghosts playing in the dark. I wonder if even the apple orchard is still there.Yesterday, meanwhile, in another world altogether, Viking Zen and I watched the first seven episodes of the second season of Avatar and wow. The new characters and developments deserve their own post, but may I just put in:
yhlee, will you not take it as calumny if I bet that a certain lightning-wielding sociopath is dear to your heart? And someone please tell me that Zuko is not about to pull a Londo Mollari, because I have become rather fond of him. Uncle Iroh maintains awesome.And I should really leave, if I want to make tonight's peformance of Coriolanus by the Actors' Shakespeare Project. I have never seen a production, their Duchess of Malfi blew me away, and my college roommate is assistant-directing, so I think it should be good. Reports when I return.
1. The only downside was the three kids behind us who kept laughing in all the wrong places. I don't know who goes to see a seventy-two-year-old foreign-language film just to make fun of the production values and the acting style, but I wish they wouldn't.
2. On a note of random genetic diversity, it was really neat to see a film in which the beautiful people did not look like everyone in Hollywood and were never intended to. Miriam Kressyn has a classical soprano and a song-and-dancer's grace of movement; she is idealized and adored by the camera and she would never be mistaken for someone whose family came from Dublin or Lyons, unless they had come from Poland first. She's lovely. This is awesome. Don't get me started on the live-action Avatar casting.