Lucy's perfume

This evening I visited Cirque du Soleil's show called 'Love', featuring tunes from the Beatles. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I consider Cirque du Soleil to be more performance arts rather than circus, and have seen other shows by them including 'la Nouba' and 'Quidam'. The fusion of Beatles music and a Beatles theme worked well for me combining some signature Cirque moments with a fair treatment of the Beatle's songs.

This was no Beatles tribute or attempt to run chronologically through the catalogue. I liked it for this, because it avoided the trap of somehow preserving the Beatles in a pure 1960-1970 time-warp. By treating it as music to be performed to, I'm sure it is a more realistic extension of the thinking of the music in its time. Before Sergeant Pepper, no one knew what to expect from that album, and I think the same can apply to the modern Cirque du Soleil treatment. There was a very slight Beatles chronology to the events (post World War 2, Beatles form, Beatles in Germany, Beatles get big, Beatles go psychedelic etc.), but this was a very lightly applied motif compared with the general spectacle of great staging to accompany Beatles songs.

For a Brit, it was interesting to see an American lens applied to this visioning, with quirky portrayals of Britain. At one point I nearly gasped when blazing Klu Klux Klan crucifixes depicted the time when the Beatles fell out of favour with middle America after Lennon's famous 'Christ' statement.

By great fortune my seat number was A9, which happened to be right in the middle of the front row, so my view was completely immersive for the show. Count 5 from the right in the front row to see my seat. The 2000 seat setting is 'in the round', with a square-ish stage which was divided into four areas before the show started. There were gentle back projections of clouds as we all walked in and instrumental Beatles numbers playing before the show kicked in.

And kick in it did. Loud, fast paced and breathtaking acrobatics along with Beatle's characters (Mr Kite, Sergeant Pepper, The Eggman etc.) driving the tacit storyline. When I saw La Nouba, or other Cirque du Soleil shows, there has been a general reference to the circus aspect as the show runs, with different acts such as high-wire and dancers appearing in turn.

This show was extremely seamless with just couple of slower moments when presumably some machinery or costume change was under way. It is difficult to describe the vaulting lofty approach used, with truly 3D staging, high into the air being used for many of the numbers. Psychedlic bubbles, rooftops appearing from under the floor and then flying into the roof, silk parachutes enveloping the entire audience from a flying bed, spiraling, floating, elevated dancers all made appearances. Signature elements of Cirque du Soleil were there too, such as appearance of characters ahead of their main activities and quirky little trains of strange objects running across the stage.

Sound was clear and sounded like my own personal surround stereo. I subsequently discovered it was! I had three speakers built around my seat; 2 in front and one behind my head.

And we had songs from every era of the Beatles, all of them familiar, yet often remixed in mainly gentle ways.

And being so close to everything, I could breathe Lucy's perfume from the sky as she swooped past, trailing glittering diamond lights.

rewind

Saturday I watched three and a half movies at a single sitting. Yes, I was flying long haul.

First was "The Last King of Scotland", an initially light and increasingly chilling portrayal of Idi Amin's brutal rule in Uganda. Intense performance by Forrest Whitaker as Idi Amin and a good counterpoint with James McAvoy as a Scottish doctor who whimsically travels to Uganda and then through naivety and recklessness gets caught into the racheting events. Great and immersive cinematography, use of colour and shape, sharply produced soundtrack make this an excellent (though sometimes harrowing) film.

Next up; The Departed: A Scorcese crime pic with Leonardo di Caprio and Matt Damon. I missed the start of this and was somewhat confused initially because I thought it was clever cutting between two diffreent timeframes (cop and cop as undercover villan), before I realised that di Caprio and Damon were really two different people. Not the smartest casting, or maybe the gin was working by this stage. Anyway, a taut cops vs bad guys movie with lots of subterfuge and 'tough guy talk' and a pretty high body count. The film had around three endings as well, in order to tidy up all of the loose ends from the various scanarios. Great Jack Nicholson menace as "Mr Bad" and twists and turns expected of the genre to the very end. No doubt will become a classic of the genre.

Then; a few minutes of Jackass 4; Nope. Not my thing. So I watched the Devil wears Prada without sound whilst I listened to my ipod and enjoyed afternoon tea.

Then; Snakes on a Plane; Totally inappropriate to watch this whilst flying on a 747, whilst a time-bombed box of non indiginous and somewhat indignant snakes get messy with a planeful of passengers. Mad mayhem - but I suppose it delivers what it says on the label. I only seleected it because I knew we were near to the destination and didn't care how much of it I saw.

And now, touched down in Las Vegas, with all eight hours of the film viewing recovered to spend again.

no comet

Yesterday was not a great evening for travelling, with gale force winds that delayed the prior plane to Frankfurt by four hours. My flight only spent around an extra hour and a half on the tarmac. On the outbound I was sitting near the back of the plane and could feel turbulence even during the take-off. We finally swished our way to Germany and did one of those 'Navy' style landings where all wheels touch down together.

Bump.

And then coming back this evening, from my window seat I assigned myself the task of looking for the McNaught comet which is within viewing range at the moment. I knew it was supposed to be somewhere to the west and we were above the clouds, but I think it was too light for me to be able to find it. The clouds were in two layers, with cotton wool below and languid whispy ones above. As we approached Heathrow I saw numerous other planes skittering around just above the cotton wool layer but, alas, no comet.

Maybe I'll look in the dawn sky to the South-East again in the morning.

terminally pretty

I just watched a documentary about the emergence of Californian music centred around the Troubadour in Los Angeles. One of the bands that formed there was the Eagles, and last night I kept hearing "take it easy" running through my head.

You know the one...
Well, I'm a standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona
and such a fine sight to see
It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford
slowin' down to take a look at me

Now I've travelled Arizona's Route 66 (though its hard to find nowadays) and know the corner in Winslow, thenearby frozen-in-time Williams and the beautiful and mystical Sedona. On Saturday, I will be in the adjacent State of Nevada and I can tell the whole area is seeping back into my subconscious.

But first I'm off to Frankfurt, Germany before, on Saturday, making the trip to the desert.

OTA Wordless Wednesday

Sometimes it is just fun to wander
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Tag: Wordless Wednesday

ringing

The final version of the Apple iPhone (above) is surprisingly similar to the rashbre lab reconstruction(below).

But then the lab did have the Apple patent to work from. Need to wait until June before they are available in the High Street.


The iPhone uses technology called Multitouch instead of a keyboard or pointer, and runs Mac OS X, which is also used on modern Macs and is a Unix variant. Predictably is has iTunes synchronisation and the full range of browser, email and similar applications. The 11.6mm thick device features a wide screen 3.5-inch, 160 dot-per-inch colour screen.

Along one side, there is a ring/silent switch and volume controls. On the silver back is a 2 megapixel digital camera. The bottom features a speaker, microphone, and iPod dock connector.

The quad-band iPhone has wifi and bluetooth and also incorporates a proximity sensor that deactivates the screen and turns off the touch sensor when the device is lifted to the face. It behaves like an iPod and supports video as well as contact scrolling for phone contacts.

The iPhone's text messaging looks like iChat and a touch keyboard appears on the screen below. Apple has also included its Safari Web browser and a version of Mail as well as a variation of dashboard widgets.

Great demo here

Tag: rashbre, iPhone, iTalk, Apple, iPod phone, Mac

time takes a cigarette

The clocks in the lounge of rashbre central have only just been adjusted back to GMT from Daylight Saving Time.

This has been less of an inconvenience than expected, including to visitors, who have been mildly relieved to gain another hour during their visits.

rashbre central time (RCT)
Originally something of an oversight, this meant that parts of rashbre central were inadvertantly on Central European Time, whilst the kitchen and some other areas had retained their British identity.

Big Sister?

Jade and Betty
Channel 4 seems to be eating itself at the moment, and the viewers seem to be enjoying it.

We have the American "Devil wears Prada" knockoff of Ugly Betty, where a minor American actress spends pre-screen hours getting prepped to look less attractive in a sitcom whose plotline is almost the Lauren Weisberger novel. I wonder whether the 'inner beauty' will be sustainable, or whether the show will need an 'LA' moment where she morphs back into her un-remodelled self?

Or a different kind of Devil with filmmaker Ken Russell now an honorary member of celebrity Jade Goody's family in "Big Brother Celebrity Edition"?

Strange how things sometimes overlap.

tags technorati : rashbre big brother jade betty ugly betty ken russell

felicity

Discernable changes now we are past the shortest day of the year. Many say the shortest day forms the start of Winter, but I'll assume that the start of December is more appropriate in the United Kingdom.

Persephone may still be in the underworld at the moment, with Demeter lonely and the ground hard, but as I left home this afternoon at around 4pm there was still daylight and even a red sky.

Maybe these are very early signs that the days are lengthening, even if we still have cold and frost. But as I took down some twefth night lights, I could already see early buds forming on the trees. The Eleusinian mysteries may be myth, but hold close to the season.

ultraviolet

A short television fix yesterday included stumbling across a movie that seems to have bypassed cinemas completely on its way to the playstation.

That so much gloss and probably cell-by-cell cgi treatment could blend with such a poor script is remarkable.

T&A based derivative futuristic vamp(ire) Manga clone vs humans delivered in ultrasillyvision.

Precis of movie below.

cube

So I'm now a member of the expresso sipping set with my fine new cube, which promises all manner of beany delights, via a capsule system. Santa brought it with about a dozen flavours to get started but I was a little sceptical when I discovered that the only way to order replacements was online.

Having now tried the order system, during Christmas week, and getting back the package of additional capsules within three days, I'm quite impressed. I mainly drink filter coffee in one variation or another, but am conscious how much can get tipped away. So these little capsules deliver a wide variety of bean types (expresso, lungo, cappucino etc) fast and in just the required amounts.

Right now I'm enjoying a Latin American Livanto.

T13 : Get Cape; Wear Cape; Fly

This is my first chance for any reflection since the start of the new year, delivered in the form of a Thursday Thirteen. I couldn't help but also look back through blog entries as part of this process. I normally only spend about ten minutes a day dropping in an entry, which varies from questions about the amount of sugar in a doughnut, to some commentary about current events, usually with a vaguely relevant picture and often using a snap that I've taken myself.

The thing I found facinatiing some twenty months since I started, was just how much gets captured in even just those fleeting entries, whether its the words, the comments from others, the digressions to other folks' blogs, the varied locations or just the amusement.

But the most intriguing part was the way time has behaved - conventional wisdom says time speeds up, but if anything the process of writing down entries has stretched it out.

So, here's around thirteen entries from 2006.

1) January : Saw the year in from rashbre west, in Florida. Then later in the month, off to Brussels and Barcelona. And my car heater broke. Lucky I was away such a lot.

2) February : Helped Christina get her website started. And she's still borrowing my server space and flickr library. Seems a lot longer since that pivotal expresso.

3) March : We ran the music mixing experiment with one of Christina's tracks which featured a foodblender. I started editing the NaNo novel from last November and arbitrarily started a 'Free link Friday', which created about 30 links.

4) April : My iPod broke, and I published instructions about how to dismantle it, which has continued to receive hits every month, ever since. Short version, use a guitar plectrum to get inside the case. Then the rest drops out fairly easily. The most likely loose connection is where the hard drive connects to the circuit board. Use electrical tape to re-secure. I also set up rashbre.tv and Simon from Holyhoses developed the definitive version of Christina's track called wind

5) May: A blogging adventure whilst in Barcelona, meeting the delighful mar and mr.mar! And in addition, a visit to the Princes Trust, which was royally attended. Oh, and a couple of bloggers set out to find out about me! Some of us prefer our anonymity.

6) June : Solstice, Mountain biking, world cup and the convent.

7) July : The Bootleg Beatles, a visit to New York, a field in Priddy Folk Festival, a visit to Dublin, Ireland and a treasure hunt in the English countryside.

8) AugustWarhol at the Fringe gets four stars in the Scotsman. Brief stops in Sweden and Verona earlier in the month.

9) September : Kate and Neal's big day; Newcastle and the Malmaison effect and travels mixed with helping Julie collect tunes from pop concerts.

10) October : Germany and Connecticut, plus a quick trip to Milan as well as several trips to Chelsea, SW3.

11) November : My second attempt at a NaNo novel. Although I did enough words, I've only written about one third of the story, interspersed with my business time in France. My strategy is to try to get the first 'novel' finished before I tidy the second one.

12) December : Off to America again, including the John Lennon Tribute. A late build towards the festive season, but including a bit of a jam session now that I've learned a few more guitar chords.

13> 2007 : Let's just say its starting well!

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Tag: Thursday Thirteen, free link friday, 82ask