The Nutcracka! (Because it is the whitest thing ever.)

Of course I can't sleep on Christmas Eve. Sleeping on Christmas Eve, for me, is like Tom Selleck without a mustache - unimaginable. 

Pretend he didn't have it. I dare you.

So here I am in my bed, wide awake. I am going to write up a new post. 

On Wednesday my lovely GF and I went down to Toronto to the National Ballet's Nutcracker at the Four Seasons Centre. The tickets were her gift to me and I had blast (I am capable of having a blast at a ballet). Talk about shattering 50's gender stereotypes. I am breaking the mold. Anyway, I had a wonderful time and I was very appreciative of the gift. 

I saw the same production of the Nutcracker a few years ago and I was quite unimpressed, but this time around I enjoyed it immensely. I suppose in the period between my viewings my appreciation for ballet has increased, but I can't say if there was any definite thing that made the difference between my viewings of the performances. 

First of all, I was impressed with the visuals. The sets were lavish and ornate where they needed to be and were similarly sparse at the appropriate moments. Far more impressive than the sets and costumes, however, were the dancers. I had previously read up on basic ballet technique before a recent trip to New York where I attended the ballet there, and I truly gained an appreciation for the dancers. Every single movement seems absolutely effortless, but realistically these ballerinas and ballerinos are performing superhuman feats on stage, EVERY NIGHT. The principal dancers were incredible - all the solo numbers and duets were absolutely beautiful - but the numbers with the full chorus of dancers were wonderful too. I really enjoy seeing the mass of movement in the synchronized dancers. Also, stereotypical ballerina costumes are the best and I love them.

See? Beautiful.

But enough about the visuals, let us speak now of the music. Really, there is no ballet music more beautiful than Tchaikovsky's. Disagree? Shut up. Obviously he is the most prominent ballet composer, but he is so for a reason. People always want to avoid conforming to widely accepted views in music, art, &c., but sometimes these widely accepted views exist for very, very good reasons. Case in point : TCHAIKOVSKY IS THE F******* BEST AT BALLET. He only wrote three, and all of them at once epitomize ballet composition, in my opinion. Naturally, I was in rapture. I cherished all of the music, but certain moments in particular were quite affecting.

The Dance of the Snowflakes was gorgeous - the setting was a forest of birches covered in snow, and the dancers were costumed as fragile snowflakes. Though visually stunning, it was the music here that I really took in. My favourite ever (in this particular scene) is when the voices come in and sing their little melody. Overall the scene was delightful indeed. Here is a Youtube clip of a different production to check it out.



For a second selection, I have chosen the pas de deux from Act II. This scene was quite profound - the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Prince, both portrayed by accomplished dancers, perform an incredible dance atop Tchaikovsky's pensive, wistful score. I especially love the descending scale over the harp line. Here:



Wednesday was an absolutely enjoyable cultural evening and I hope to enjoy a similar evening in the near future (not going to happen).

In Defense of the Arts

Dang. It is hard to be an English major.
     I was speaking to a friend recently about an issue I feel very strongly about. More and more, it seems, the arts are being devalued. Anyone with an English degree, a philosophy degree, or any degree in the arts, should they be daring enough to pursue such a degree, is ridiculed and forced into the position of having to defend their choice. This is something that both my friend and I have experienced, and doubtless many others have too. I chose to study literature not only because I love it passionately, but because I passionately believe in its the importance and power, and in the importance and power of all the arts.
     I could write at length about my feelings about this, but I'm going to cut myself short here and turn it over to Mr. William Faulkner. This is Faulkner's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature. This speech offers at least one argument for the importance of the arts, and it is one that I find especially convincing and entirely relevant to our times. Enjoy. Believe.

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Speech originally posted @ www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/faulkner/faulkner.html

Third time is a charm?

This is my third shot at a blog - hopefully this one will stick. Don't have a real post now though, I have to go to bed. I have to get up bright and early to write my last exam for the semester.
What am I doing this for right now anyway?

Okay I feel weird not doing a real post for the first one. I want to start out properly so that this blog might actually be something. So... here is a picture of Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab.

Apparently they were good friends. I read a Tesla biography one time, and it was pretty cool I guess. Mark Twain was always hanging around with Tesla. Tesla was pretty much the greatest electrician/inventor ever and he was always coming up with cool new stuff. Apparently at the time of his death he had plans for an ultra-death-ray. I don't know if that is true, but one time he made a super-vibrator-platform (I don't know, it probably had some electrical function but there was a platform to stand on and it vibrated) and he said it could be good for giving the body a good old shake-up massage, and Mark Twain stood on it and almost pooped his pants.