Hooray! says I, who loves everything medieval. This series, based on the book by Ken Follett, has everything I love: life-or-death royal power mongering, salt-of-the-earth good guys, slippery Gray Character bad guys, several young male characters all trying to find their places in the world, strong and resourceful female characters who push the boundaries of what society allows them to be without zigzagging into anachronistic territory.
There's swords, horses, battles, kings, monks, a wise woman, castles, cathedrals, sins, secrets, and backstory waiting to change everything.
One of the things that marks a long-lasting relationship, be it a friendship or a romantic partnership, is the inside joke.
My husband and I have our share. One of them comes from The Princess Bride, when Westley is brought to Miracle Max to be revived after he's mostly dead.
When he uses the bellows to find out what Westley considers worth living for, Westley says "True love."
But Miracle Max insists he said, "To blave."
For nearly 25 years now, Brad and I use that line to our unending delight. A two-word line in a film has provided us with an amazing amount of mileage.
Do you have a favorite in-joke with your honey or best buddy?
It's probably hard to imagine that orchestra conductors don't emerge fully-formed from the womb in white tie and tails.
However, these elite artists have to train like anyone else in order to harness the potential of a live performance.
While I was rooting around on You Tube some time ago for pieces from Stravinsky's Apollo, I came across this clip of a young conductor learning his craft. He takes the orchestra through the second Apollo variation, one of my favorite pieces of music, during a masterclass with Russian conductor Yuri Simonov.
Artists are forever fine-tuning their techniques. Learning and growing should never end for those of us who create. The key is to never confuse instruction with a message of not-good-enough. Embrace refinement of your craft. Find the courage to climb higher.
This past Friday I had a little sip from the nectar of the gods when my mom picked me up after work, we went out for dinner and then settled into our seats for a cello recital.
Halifax is currently in its second week of hosting the Scotia Festival of Music. With my mom being a new cello student, she bought herself a senior's pass to the festival and has been attending open dress rehearsals and master classes (where audiences can observe advanced students taking class from master teachers.)
For a treat, she snagged the tickets to Friday night's packed performance at The Music Room, a newer venue I'd never been to before and absolutely adored.
There we sat enraptured by a solo performance by Matt Haimovitz. Mom had watched him give a master class earlier in the week, and pointed out the young musician he'd been teaching, who joined Friday night's audience along with quite a number of young musicians.
Photo by Bette Marshall
For some folks, kicking back after a long week at work means heading for the pub for a couple of draft beer. For others, meeting for coffee and conversation does the trick, or gathering for drinks at a soothing dark bar.
For me - other than grabbing a bite and going to see a movie, which is the other perfect thing to do - going for dinner and then to see a concert or dance performance is the closest thing to heaven I can find.
Halifax music critic Stephen Pedersen wrote in The Chronicle Herald:
"Cellist Matt Haimovitz goes his own way.
That is true of all the Scotia Festival of Music master artists, in a way. But Friday night, in his solo recital in The Music Room, Haimovitz carved his path so expertly and with such unhesitating self-confidence and momentum that he could be said to have graded it, widened it, paved it and invited the sold-out audience to roll along down its broad avenue with him.
His Bach was a masterful, unique, almost unimaginably right performance in which, rather than maintain a steady pulse, he went with the flow, following the dynamic curve of each passage, revealing the architectural design of each of its six movements, echoing the improvisational style he had so cleverly set up with the Gabrieli earlier in the program."
Last month I was prompted to put this art show up on my Sidebar Art Gallery because of the third piece, The Prodigal Son in Modern Life: The Return by James Tissot. I have that one in my Scorpius picture file, which I gather like a storyboard. I grab lots of images from the web that put me in the middle of my story, and I have a picture file for all of my stories.
I also have several physical collages of my stories because my writers' group does collage workshops every now and then. I love doing them.
I was drawn to the art inspired by the Prodigal Son's story because of the dynamic between the father and son. Particularly for Scorpius, who isn't a Prodigal sort in any way, but who longs for his father because he was abandoned and never claimed.
In my Weekend Writer's Retreat serial fiction, this longing for a father figure finds refuge in his falconer master, Richolf.
You may know I've had a wonderful run of great luck in winning blog contests. I have had untold packages arrive at my house in the four years I've been blogging, all from fellow bloggers who have offered prizes on their blogs.
It's a really inspirational collection of stories from published writers on what it took for them personally to finally hold their books in their hands.
I'd like to share this passage with you, written by one of the editors of the book, Ray White:
"Never surrender, never give up, never quit. Those aren't just words to get published by; they're words to live by.
Less than one percent of writers get published in book-length fiction or nonfiction. Now I am absolutely, positively making these statistics up (though I did extrapolate them from all those agent Web sites where they claim to reject 99 percent of all submissions.)
As Yoda said, 'Do, or do not. There is no try.'
Let rejection roll off your back and even go so far as to see each rejection as another step toward success."
Last Wednesday, one of those glorious, serendipitous moments happened to bring me to a production that has excited my spirit ever since.
As I sat tapping away at my keyboard, my husband scrolled through the menu on TV when he bumped into Great Performances. Knowing I wouldn't want to miss ballet if it was on, he checked out the upcoming broadcast.
I was disappointed for a fleeting second when it turned out to be a play. But only for a second.
Hamlet! My favorite of the Bard's plays. Yes, I have a movie poster from Zeffirelli's Hamlet in my living room.
This Hamlet is played by David Tennant, who helped me hear new things in Shakespeare's lines, in a play I love dearly and have seen in many incarnations.
Ecstasy of ecstacies - both the Ghost of the slain king and Claudius are played by Patrick Stewart.
There is a highly imaginative use of different cameras as metaphor throughout the production, including security cameras that don't register the ghost of Hamlet's father.
I was always impressed by Glen Close's version of Hamlet's mother, Gertrude - but this interpretation by Penny Downie is my favorite by far.
I quite like the real concern for the state of the soul in this production. There is a compassionate motivation to the Ghost's distressing appearances, as he seeks to spare his wife from paying for a sin she's not aware she's committing. Often the Ghost comes across as merely being consumed by sibling rivalry from beyond the grave. But not Patrick Stewart's version.
This Queen of Denmark is genuinely moving on from the death of her first husband, finding solace in her former brother-in-law, a far stronger woman than we normally see. Instead of playing Gertrude as a pawn between heads of state, Penny Downie gives us someone evolving past widowhood into an optimistic bride. Hamlet's revelations splinter Gertrude's world more intimately than I've seen done elsewhere, because this is played as a true family drama and less as a clash of royal titans.
And here is my favorite scene from every version of Hamlet, the one I wait impatiently for - the scene in Hamlet's mother's room. It's posted here in two segments:
Champion of the Arts - I write historical and paranormal fiction, as well as poetry. I love to showcase creative works by artists of all stripes. Blogging from Nova Scotia, Canada
Posts
