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Dec. 17th, 2019 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Still enjoying the heck out of the Korean television series Boys Over Flowers - it's really funny in places, and part of the fun - is playing Mystery Science Theater with it.
Jan-di: Oh Gu Pyn-ro thank you for the necklace...but is it really one of a kind.
Gu: Yes, I created it for you. But if you lose it you really are dead.
ME: Seriously, go for the musician -- so easier. This guy is high maintenance.
The heir to a major corporation has fallen in love with a commoner. Meanwhile, so has his friend, Ji-Hoon, an accomplished musician. The musician is sensitive, doesn't bully, aloof, and kind to the commoner from the beginning. Although he's hung up on his child-hood friend, the commoner's idol. But he gets over her finally, alas too late -- by that time, our heroine is in love with his incredibly high maintenance and equally beautiful buddy. (Korean men are very pretty. Just saying.)
So, I keep talking back to the show. "Yes, yes, I agree he's quite hot. But sooo high maintenance. You have to fight his mother, his family, all the jealous women who want him, his prejudice, his world, and all the people who have a beef with him because he was a bully. Trust me, not worth it -- go for the musician, not as a high maintenance."
LOL! I find it very comforting. It's also a bit of an indictment of capitalism, which is interesting.
Boy: You put our family pride above money, Mom. I'm so proud of you. It is more important!
Mother: No. Our society is ruled by capitalism, there is nothing more important than money. Money before all else. This is what $3 million? Nothing. We're worth more than that. If she marries Gu Jung-Pyro -- and that old woman can't live forever, he'll inherit far more than $3 Million.
LOL! Reminds me so much of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which had similar indictments of the British class system and marriage market.
Also, another interesting bit? They have songs that are in Korean and English, and occasionally say one or two words in English amid the Korean. It's something I've grown used to living in NYC is hearing people talk in their language and English at the same time.
These shows are addictive. Also, apparently Korean High School goes past the age of 19? The heroine is 19 and finally in her senior year? I graduated from high school at the age of 17-18.
Anyhow, I find it a great stress reliever. Which I need right now. Work, the news, the weather, the season, etc is just stressful and kind of depressing.
2. Now watching Kennedy Center Honors on tape. I watch for the performances, and bios....don't really agree with honoring people for past accomplishments, feels very....
But, they did Linda Ronstandt first, and I loved Linda Ronstandt as a kid. I had a lot of her music on eight track tapes -- way back in the 1970s and 80s. Also cassetts. She had some amazing songs.
Linda Ronstadt Songs.
They are also honoring Sally Field, Sesame Street, Michael Tilson, and Earth Wind and Fire.
The Sally Field -- bit is interesting, and yes, The Flying Nun is an insane series. The fact that she rose above that to do Sybil and Norma Rae is amazing. Although I find the people that they get to do this -- interesting, since it's not who you'd expect, and not the ones I'd pick. (Spielberg, Pierce Bronsan, Maura Tierney? Really? Are her contemporaries dead or unavailable? Also when did Bronsan get old? Or Tom Hanks for that matter? They all have long grey beards.)
Then Sesame Street -- which is the show of my childhood. It started in 1969 - when I was about two and half or so. It's the first television series I ever watched. I watched it until I was about 7 or 8, I think. That and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, Electric Company, and later Captain Kangeroo. I loved Sesame Street. The later 60s and early 70s were the Golden Age of Children's Television in part because of The Children's Television Act and advent of PBS, along with the Sesame Street Workshop, and Jim Hensen. Joseph Gordon-Levit - got old? He's in his thirties with kids? Ack.
I remember the kid.
They've removed politics from it -- by not inviting the Doofus.
Wow, Debra Winger is still alive. I haven't seen her in ages. She looks great and completely unrecognizable.
Tilson got better guests than the others did. With Audra McDonald and an amazing musician that he wrote a composition for. I think it's easier to get people for composers and musicians, than actors.
3. Oh, and according to the ads, West Side Story is coming back to Broadway. I may try to see that. I've never seen it performed on stage and have always wanted to. It's one of my favorite musicals. Also it appears to be featuring African Americans in key roles. Inter-racial casting.
And the amazing song -- "Somewhere There is a Place for Us" -- which is among the best songs ever written. Audra McDonald just sang it at the Kennedy Center Awards.
For me, a musical has to have the following things in order to work:
* At least two songs that are timeless and can stand outside the musical and are timeless
* A story that is universally relatable and pulls you inside the characters
* Dance sequences, the more the better -- movement
* complicated characters -- no clear villains or good guys
* Tells a good story through song and dance
Few fit those qualifications. Musicals have a tendency to fall into one of three categories: melodramatic operetta, song-dance anthology with no real story or an sexist offensive one, or a juke box stories that are just songs strung together.
Good musicals are hard to find. Unfortunately. I know, I have seen almost everything.
West Side Story, while horribly dated with it's slang dialogue in spots, was that perfect marriage of composition, lyric, choreography, and story. It also had something to say. You remember it long after you see it. And it also entertains. And the songs haunt. And stay with you.
Other musicals that fit that experience are:
* Cabaret
* Jesus Christ Superstar
* Evita
* Singing in the Rain
* Carousel
* The Sound of Music
* My Fair Lady
* Porgy & Bess
* Les Miserables
* The Music Man
* Hamilton
* Spring Awakening
* Rent
* Pippin
* Into the Woods
* Sweeny Todd
* American in Paris
* A Chorus Line
* Gypsy
To name just a few, off the top of my head.
4. Finished the book I was slugging my way through finally. "Captives of the Night by Loretta Chase" -- it was okay. The pacing could have been better. I skimmed a lot. It's one of Chase's earlier books so misses the mark with the humor and banter seen in the later novels.
5. I've seen people stating how this is the "Darkest Time Line" and I'm wondering, uhm how old are you? And have you studied any history at all? I saw a German historian, who reads historicals and non-fiction histories for a living -- do it. And I thought...really? So this is worse than say the 1930s-1940s? The Holocaust? The dropping of not one but two atomic bombs? The Bolshevic Revolution? Stalin? The Cold War and Lynchings in the 1950s-1960s? Vietnam and Watergate? The Crusades? Slavery? The Civil War? The Revolutionary War? The Middle Ages? The Spainish Inquistion? WWI?
It's enough to make me wish I could whisk people back in time via the Tardis and show them -- "you think this era is bad, let's see how you deal with a year in the antebellum South or Dickens Victorian Era, or how about WWII during the Blitz?"
Human beings, or so I've noticed, have a tendency towards hyperbole. Myself included. We like to embellish and exaggerate. And jump to extremes. I mean telling someone that it's a difficult time is rather dull when you can say -- it's the darkest time line EVER.
I keep wanting to say: "People stop romanticizing the past -- it wasn't better. Just different." I don't know why everyone does this. But people do. I think because our memory protects us. We forget the bad stuff and just remember the good stuff. So, we tend to look back on the past with a blurry eyed nostalgia....deleting or blurring all the nasty or worrisome bits. The 1950s are breezy, the 60s are the Space Race and the Season of Love, the 1940s are great movies, and simpler times. The 1980s - are blockbuster movies, and no bothersome technology.
But we forget all the rest - such as Iran-Contra Hearings, Reganomics, The Gulf War, Vietnam, Watergate, Anita Hill Hearings, The Lynchings in the South, Slavery, The Genocide of various American Indian tribes, Trial of Tears, Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Assassinations of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and JFK.
I think it is important to remember the good and bad in history -- or you risk repeating the bad, and not the good.
Jan-di: Oh Gu Pyn-ro thank you for the necklace...but is it really one of a kind.
Gu: Yes, I created it for you. But if you lose it you really are dead.
ME: Seriously, go for the musician -- so easier. This guy is high maintenance.
The heir to a major corporation has fallen in love with a commoner. Meanwhile, so has his friend, Ji-Hoon, an accomplished musician. The musician is sensitive, doesn't bully, aloof, and kind to the commoner from the beginning. Although he's hung up on his child-hood friend, the commoner's idol. But he gets over her finally, alas too late -- by that time, our heroine is in love with his incredibly high maintenance and equally beautiful buddy. (Korean men are very pretty. Just saying.)
So, I keep talking back to the show. "Yes, yes, I agree he's quite hot. But sooo high maintenance. You have to fight his mother, his family, all the jealous women who want him, his prejudice, his world, and all the people who have a beef with him because he was a bully. Trust me, not worth it -- go for the musician, not as a high maintenance."
LOL! I find it very comforting. It's also a bit of an indictment of capitalism, which is interesting.
Boy: You put our family pride above money, Mom. I'm so proud of you. It is more important!
Mother: No. Our society is ruled by capitalism, there is nothing more important than money. Money before all else. This is what $3 million? Nothing. We're worth more than that. If she marries Gu Jung-Pyro -- and that old woman can't live forever, he'll inherit far more than $3 Million.
LOL! Reminds me so much of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which had similar indictments of the British class system and marriage market.
Also, another interesting bit? They have songs that are in Korean and English, and occasionally say one or two words in English amid the Korean. It's something I've grown used to living in NYC is hearing people talk in their language and English at the same time.
These shows are addictive. Also, apparently Korean High School goes past the age of 19? The heroine is 19 and finally in her senior year? I graduated from high school at the age of 17-18.
Anyhow, I find it a great stress reliever. Which I need right now. Work, the news, the weather, the season, etc is just stressful and kind of depressing.
2. Now watching Kennedy Center Honors on tape. I watch for the performances, and bios....don't really agree with honoring people for past accomplishments, feels very....
But, they did Linda Ronstandt first, and I loved Linda Ronstandt as a kid. I had a lot of her music on eight track tapes -- way back in the 1970s and 80s. Also cassetts. She had some amazing songs.
Linda Ronstadt Songs.
They are also honoring Sally Field, Sesame Street, Michael Tilson, and Earth Wind and Fire.
The Sally Field -- bit is interesting, and yes, The Flying Nun is an insane series. The fact that she rose above that to do Sybil and Norma Rae is amazing. Although I find the people that they get to do this -- interesting, since it's not who you'd expect, and not the ones I'd pick. (Spielberg, Pierce Bronsan, Maura Tierney? Really? Are her contemporaries dead or unavailable? Also when did Bronsan get old? Or Tom Hanks for that matter? They all have long grey beards.)
Then Sesame Street -- which is the show of my childhood. It started in 1969 - when I was about two and half or so. It's the first television series I ever watched. I watched it until I was about 7 or 8, I think. That and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, Electric Company, and later Captain Kangeroo. I loved Sesame Street. The later 60s and early 70s were the Golden Age of Children's Television in part because of The Children's Television Act and advent of PBS, along with the Sesame Street Workshop, and Jim Hensen. Joseph Gordon-Levit - got old? He's in his thirties with kids? Ack.
I remember the kid.
They've removed politics from it -- by not inviting the Doofus.
Wow, Debra Winger is still alive. I haven't seen her in ages. She looks great and completely unrecognizable.
Tilson got better guests than the others did. With Audra McDonald and an amazing musician that he wrote a composition for. I think it's easier to get people for composers and musicians, than actors.
3. Oh, and according to the ads, West Side Story is coming back to Broadway. I may try to see that. I've never seen it performed on stage and have always wanted to. It's one of my favorite musicals. Also it appears to be featuring African Americans in key roles. Inter-racial casting.
And the amazing song -- "Somewhere There is a Place for Us" -- which is among the best songs ever written. Audra McDonald just sang it at the Kennedy Center Awards.
For me, a musical has to have the following things in order to work:
* At least two songs that are timeless and can stand outside the musical and are timeless
* A story that is universally relatable and pulls you inside the characters
* Dance sequences, the more the better -- movement
* complicated characters -- no clear villains or good guys
* Tells a good story through song and dance
Few fit those qualifications. Musicals have a tendency to fall into one of three categories: melodramatic operetta, song-dance anthology with no real story or an sexist offensive one, or a juke box stories that are just songs strung together.
Good musicals are hard to find. Unfortunately. I know, I have seen almost everything.
West Side Story, while horribly dated with it's slang dialogue in spots, was that perfect marriage of composition, lyric, choreography, and story. It also had something to say. You remember it long after you see it. And it also entertains. And the songs haunt. And stay with you.
Other musicals that fit that experience are:
* Cabaret
* Jesus Christ Superstar
* Evita
* Singing in the Rain
* Carousel
* The Sound of Music
* My Fair Lady
* Porgy & Bess
* Les Miserables
* The Music Man
* Hamilton
* Spring Awakening
* Rent
* Pippin
* Into the Woods
* Sweeny Todd
* American in Paris
* A Chorus Line
* Gypsy
To name just a few, off the top of my head.
4. Finished the book I was slugging my way through finally. "Captives of the Night by Loretta Chase" -- it was okay. The pacing could have been better. I skimmed a lot. It's one of Chase's earlier books so misses the mark with the humor and banter seen in the later novels.
5. I've seen people stating how this is the "Darkest Time Line" and I'm wondering, uhm how old are you? And have you studied any history at all? I saw a German historian, who reads historicals and non-fiction histories for a living -- do it. And I thought...really? So this is worse than say the 1930s-1940s? The Holocaust? The dropping of not one but two atomic bombs? The Bolshevic Revolution? Stalin? The Cold War and Lynchings in the 1950s-1960s? Vietnam and Watergate? The Crusades? Slavery? The Civil War? The Revolutionary War? The Middle Ages? The Spainish Inquistion? WWI?
It's enough to make me wish I could whisk people back in time via the Tardis and show them -- "you think this era is bad, let's see how you deal with a year in the antebellum South or Dickens Victorian Era, or how about WWII during the Blitz?"
Human beings, or so I've noticed, have a tendency towards hyperbole. Myself included. We like to embellish and exaggerate. And jump to extremes. I mean telling someone that it's a difficult time is rather dull when you can say -- it's the darkest time line EVER.
I keep wanting to say: "People stop romanticizing the past -- it wasn't better. Just different." I don't know why everyone does this. But people do. I think because our memory protects us. We forget the bad stuff and just remember the good stuff. So, we tend to look back on the past with a blurry eyed nostalgia....deleting or blurring all the nasty or worrisome bits. The 1950s are breezy, the 60s are the Space Race and the Season of Love, the 1940s are great movies, and simpler times. The 1980s - are blockbuster movies, and no bothersome technology.
But we forget all the rest - such as Iran-Contra Hearings, Reganomics, The Gulf War, Vietnam, Watergate, Anita Hill Hearings, The Lynchings in the South, Slavery, The Genocide of various American Indian tribes, Trial of Tears, Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Assassinations of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and JFK.
I think it is important to remember the good and bad in history -- or you risk repeating the bad, and not the good.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-18 09:40 am (UTC)"coughs" Somewhere is not included in the new revival ...
no subject
Date: 2019-12-18 01:29 pm (UTC)It's not? Why? And how really odd. They also took out "I Feel Pretty" - which really are the only songs that can be sung outside the musical and be understood on their own. Everything else is fairly slang ridden, and contextual to the musical. Maybe that's why? Except if you are stripping all the 1950s trappings from it -- wouldn't you strip some of the other songs instead?
It's supposed to be more violent, aggressive, dance wise. And much shorter. Hmmm...depends on how pricey in regards to whether I see it. They are also stripping all the Jerome Robbins choreography, with a brand new more avant gard choreographer.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-18 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-18 06:04 pm (UTC)Hmm...interesting casting and choices. I read about the director -- he's a hot item right now. Oh, also interesting? Both the Music Man and West Side Story are doing revivals next year, but the Music Man won't be eligible for the Tony's until 2021 -- it's being released in October with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster in the leads. Unlike West Side Story, it requires the marquee value -- ironic considering it beat West Side Story out in the original Tony's.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-19 01:11 am (UTC)I'm so glad we're still making new and memorable musicals, even in this ongoing recycling of every previous hit.