Pearl Buck also did a translation of Shui Hu Chuan, which makes her even more awesome.

[gogmagog]

Dammit, it is so hot...the A/C in my bedroom broke a couple of nights ago, and so now if I want to get any sleep at all I have to sleep in my mom's recliner in the air-conditioned living room because if I try to sleep in my room I will BE ROASTED LIKE CHESTNUTS OVER AN OPEN FIRE. Then when my parents get up in the morning I generally catch a few hours of z's in their air-conditioned room, so I'm doing okay. But still, sleeping in the recliner is making my neck sore. >_<

From IMDb:
Sitcom About Gay Rock Star Won't Air
A planned ABC sitcom produced by Elton John and his longtime lyricist, Bernie Taupin, about a gay rock star will apparently never see the light of a TV tube. According to Fox News, the show, titled Him & Us, which was to have starred Anthony Head as Max Flash and Sex and the City's Kim Cattrall as his manager Samantha, was not picked up despite initial favorable reaction to the pilot. In an interview with The Stage magazine, Cattrall remarked, "It would have been a great series. Perhaps the subject matter might have been too much for some people."

...they were going to do a series with Anthony Stewart Head (a.k.a. Giles on Buffy) as a campy gay rock star being managed by Samantha from Sex and the City? And now it's cancelled? WOES

Anyway, what interesting stuff has happened this week...well, my parents have been having car trouble again (we took in their car Monday morning and just got it back this afternoon, and their bank account is $900 lighter), so I still haven't been out to get my learner's permit. I hope to do that and maybe go to the bank tomorrow, but God only knows whether that'll happen.

Also, yesterday I hung out most of the day with rathershady and courters28; they had never had Jack Stack (oh deprived children! never mind that they're both older than me) so we went and they discovered the awesomeness that is the Fiorella family barbecue sauce. Then we played Vinnie's board game Ticket to Ride, which was pretty fun (and which I won, w00t).

And this evening my stepdad dragged me and my mom to Mike Burstyn at Kehilath Israel. (Here he is on the IMDb.) I knew about him because he's the son of Pesach Burstein and Lillian Lux, two of the big Yiddish stage stars (his father was the subject of the documentary Der Komediant) and he's been on the Yiddish stage himself (and later Broadway) since he was a child. And you can kind of tell he comes from the Yiddish stage, because his patter was quite close to what I've heard of those of the entertainers at the classic Catskills resorts (you may have seen them in movies like Dirty Dancing and Sweet Lorraine). A sample joke:

My father once told me the joke about the tribe of Jewish cannibals they found in Africa. Have you heard it? See, one cannibal says to the other, "I hate my meshugginah [crazy] mother-in-law." "Then just eat the noodles," his friend tells him.

Still, he seemed nice, and the jokes were funny (if groaningly horrible). And his singing was quite good as well, though it seemed like everything he sung was either in Yiddish, from like 1958, or from musicals he'd starred in that I'd never seen, like Barnum (in which Glenn Close was discovered as his costar); the only one I recognized was "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof (since apparently he finally got to play Tevye in a recent Mormon production in Salt Lake City XD). Still it was fun and I'm not sorry I went.

The synagogue where it was being held was pretty interesting in and of itself...I'd only ever been to Reform temples before, and KI is Conservative, so I was slightly taken aback at being presented with a kippah (a.k.a. yarmulke, for you Yiddish speakers) that I had to put on before I could enter the sanctuary. It didn't help that it wouldn't stay on my less-than-obedient hair. XD

I discovered on my way out that apparently there was a place you could get hairpins to hold it on that I just hadn't noticed. D'oh.

I was also not expecting folks to just be wandering around and chatting to each other during the event itself; I guess Conservative synagogues are laxer about that kind of thing, but it just seemed rude. Also, when I used the bathroom I counted no less than three old men who were talking on their cellphones as they used the urinal. Seriously, folks, if you can't detach the cell phone from your ear long enough to take a piss, you have a serious problem. >_<

Let's see, what else...Oh yeah! I also watched Ladies in Lavender with my parents earlier in the week. We kind of figured it would be good - the two main characters are Judi Dench and Maggie Smith playing sisters, who are kind of like chocolate and peanut butter in that the only real questions was "why didn't someone think to pair these two before now?" - but it was even better than we'd expected. They're both great as two elderly unmarried sisters living on the Welsh coast between the wars, whose lives take an unexpected turn for the exciting when a young foreign man, Andrea, washes up on the coast near their home. They take him in, and as they teach him English and he recovers from a broken ankle they find themselves growing closer to him; Janet (Smith) starts to look on him as a surrogate son, while Ursula (Dench) sees him as something else entirely.

Judi Dench is awesome - she can convey with a look and a pause what less experienced actresses need an entire speech for. She's perfect as a woman feeling romantic love for the first time, under possibly the worst possible circumstances (for someone forty or fifty years younger who looks on her as another surrogate mother). On the other hand, I don't think anyone can blame poor Ursula, given that Andrea is a genius violinist, has an engaging personality, and (oh yeah) looks like this (i.e., like a younger, cuter Jake Gyllenhaal; and I know he totally looks like jailbait but he's actually several years older than I am). Daniel Bruhl isn't just eye candy, though - he's also really good in his role and holds his own with these two grande dames, as does Natascha McElhone as the scandalously single artist who wants to make Andrea her pet project. There are also quite a few good British character actors in the movie as well. So definitely consider this a recommendation!

Let's Positive Linking!
- Hapsburgs retake Dracula Castle. It sounds like an alternate history plotline, but it's true. Those wacky Hapsburgs.
- Army refusing to put wiccan symbol on soldier's tombstone. Seriously, what the fuck. Just slap the frickin' pentacle on the tombstone instead of stonewalling, army!
- Running backwards apparently the new hot exercise. Freaky.
- And for any of y'all in the Chicago area who are interested in cake (and who haven't seen this already, which limits it to probably none of you), jantalaimon has opened her Janaderia for business (metaphorically speaking, there is no actual building, just the opportunity to commission tasty tasty cakes).

...dammit, and I didn't even get around to my rants about the victim competition that takes place in postcolonial/feminist/race/gender theory, or about the Southern myth that everyone was either white gentry or black slave (and smear campaigns against folks like the author of God's Little Acre that actually wrote about poor white people and the downside of their circumstances) or the failure of feminist literary scholars to do anything with women authors like Pearl Buck (who I'm fairly certain was the first female to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, and certainly the first American woman to do so; but it took Oprah to even bring her books back into print). I guess those will have to wait for another day!

Comments

[rathershady.livejournal.com]

Have you seen Anthony Stewart Head in Little Britain? He plays a straight british PM that is constantly being lusted after by his gay assistant. He does play the (so-called) straight man but it is still funny and kind of weird since I keep expecting Sarah Michelle Gellar to come swinging in from nowhere.

[jantalaimon.livejournal.com]

do you get BBCA? cos if you do, watch Little Britain sometime (if you haven't already). i don't think he's regularly on, but Anthony Head has had some amusing roles on that show. XD damn, too bad that show didn't get picked up, it would've been awesome! ;.; of course, i'll always think of Kim Cattrall as a vulcan from the Wrath of Khan movie, but that's cos i'm a nerd. XD

and thanks muchly for the pimpage! if you're ever up this way, i'll have to make you some cake. XD