(no subject)
As usual, we ended up getting much less done last night than we had anticipated. Not because of time, well - a little bit because of time, but more so because of us just being effing exhausted. Traffic was terrible due to a heavy-ish rain and bad-ish roads. Two hours to get from work to Oakville. LAME. SO GLAD I won't have to do that anymore. So we checked with the landlord, and it's okay for us to pick up the rest of the stuff today. So we did one carload, and that was it. We picked up a pizza and a couple of movies and did some major unpacking. Four boxes worth, etc. My piano is here! It's very nice that it lives with me now. It's too bad I don't get to play it more, but I can live with that fact.
It's doubling as a bookshelf right now, which is a little unorthodox but looks nice. And needs must when the devil drives. It has to be tuned VERY badly. It's been moved twice now - once professionally and once... not. And I didn't tune it either time. It's amazing how rumbles and bumbs throw it right out of tune. Especially in the lower register. Not that anyone but Marian cares about this.
Anyways, we unpacked some stuff and watched Memoirs of a Geisha. I found the novel extremely consuming. I read it over two and a half days which is really not a huge deal, but with the amount that I work during the week, it is for me. The book really was all-consuming. I learned so much about a particular culture, and got completely wrapped up in this intense storyline with hugely rich characters and dialogue. The movie paled in comparison. Ziyi Zhang was stunning, it's true, but the adaptation was poorly weighted. Although the visuals were stunning, the emphasis was all wrong in my mind. I enjoyed it, but it failed to hold my attention.
I also read Brokeback Mountain recently. It's taken me a while to formulate an opinion about that one. I had predispositions about it, based on what I had heard. I had heard it was about intense, pure love between two people - that trancends all cultural boundaries. And personally, I have no emotional barriers relating to homosexuality whatsoever. But for some reason, the book left a strange taste in my mouth, and it took me a few weeks to understand why.
There are only a few sex scenes in the story - short, but graphic. It's a little different to read them, I guess. The words used are slang and coarse, in keeping with the "cowboy" appearance, I guess. But it doesn't jive with the fact that everyone keeps telling me it's so romantic. In the meetings of the two main characters, I sense no passion or affection. I would liken the meetings between them more to a meeting of a prostitute and their customer. Even at the end of the story, when bits of affection start to come through, it still is clear that they really didn't understand eachother particularly well - or know a lot about eachother. To me it was two closeted men cheating on their famalies for the sole purpose of sex. That they were using one another for sex, or something like that.
I've gotten a much more "in love" sense of homosexual relationships from films like "If These Walls Could Talk" or "The Object of My Affection". Or "Rent". Or even terrible teen movie "But I'm A Cheerleader!" Now, the movie adaptation of the novel may be quite different then Annie Proulx's short story, so I'm not really making a fair comparison. A lot of love can come accross in a glance or a touch, that you can't show through written word. So maybe I need to reserve judgement.
It's doubling as a bookshelf right now, which is a little unorthodox but looks nice. And needs must when the devil drives. It has to be tuned VERY badly. It's been moved twice now - once professionally and once... not. And I didn't tune it either time. It's amazing how rumbles and bumbs throw it right out of tune. Especially in the lower register. Not that anyone but Marian cares about this.
Anyways, we unpacked some stuff and watched Memoirs of a Geisha. I found the novel extremely consuming. I read it over two and a half days which is really not a huge deal, but with the amount that I work during the week, it is for me. The book really was all-consuming. I learned so much about a particular culture, and got completely wrapped up in this intense storyline with hugely rich characters and dialogue. The movie paled in comparison. Ziyi Zhang was stunning, it's true, but the adaptation was poorly weighted. Although the visuals were stunning, the emphasis was all wrong in my mind. I enjoyed it, but it failed to hold my attention.
I also read Brokeback Mountain recently. It's taken me a while to formulate an opinion about that one. I had predispositions about it, based on what I had heard. I had heard it was about intense, pure love between two people - that trancends all cultural boundaries. And personally, I have no emotional barriers relating to homosexuality whatsoever. But for some reason, the book left a strange taste in my mouth, and it took me a few weeks to understand why.
There are only a few sex scenes in the story - short, but graphic. It's a little different to read them, I guess. The words used are slang and coarse, in keeping with the "cowboy" appearance, I guess. But it doesn't jive with the fact that everyone keeps telling me it's so romantic. In the meetings of the two main characters, I sense no passion or affection. I would liken the meetings between them more to a meeting of a prostitute and their customer. Even at the end of the story, when bits of affection start to come through, it still is clear that they really didn't understand eachother particularly well - or know a lot about eachother. To me it was two closeted men cheating on their famalies for the sole purpose of sex. That they were using one another for sex, or something like that.
I've gotten a much more "in love" sense of homosexual relationships from films like "If These Walls Could Talk" or "The Object of My Affection". Or "Rent". Or even terrible teen movie "But I'm A Cheerleader!" Now, the movie adaptation of the novel may be quite different then Annie Proulx's short story, so I'm not really making a fair comparison. A lot of love can come accross in a glance or a touch, that you can't show through written word. So maybe I need to reserve judgement.