bironic

synn and I went to Montreal for a week!

Neither of us had ever visited. We ate all of the things.* We also walked around all day almost every day to explore neighborhoods, sites, and museums, despite the nippy winter-into-spring weather: at or just below freezing most days, blustery, flurries. It wasn't too bad for me because Boston has been having a late, cold spring, but poor synn flew up from balmy North Carolina. The first front blew in on the evening we arrived, knocking over the bajillion road construction signs and sandwich boards as we leaned into the snowy gusts and cried, "Pourquoi????"

We spent Friday at a Supernatural con: synn is a fan of the show and I have liked one of the con guests, Sebastian Roché—who played a recurring character named Balthazar for, IIRC what synn said, one season out of 13, but SPN fans never forget—for, yikes, 20 years now, and never had the chance to meet him. We went to his Q&A, we took a silly Official Photo where synn suffered me to ask him to pretend to be evil vampire Mikael from The Vampire Diaries/The Originals and we pretended to be scared, and thanks to synn's sneaky generosity, I was also treated to a seat at his meet and greet, where seven attendees and Sebastian chatted around a table for 45 minutes. It was super nice. I also enjoyed the Q&A with Lisa Berry (Billy) and Kim Rhodes (Jody). Much more sedate and heartfelt than Sebastian's, who spent most of his time jumping on chairs and singing a dumb (but I guess charming) song with and about the house band. He did speak a lot of French, though, while making fun of Quebecois vs. France-French accents and lingo, which made my teenage heart go pitter-patter. And he made no secret of his attraction to Misha Collins, including, while answering an audience question about which cast member he would choose to be his slave for the day, the title of my new favorite Dr. Seuss book: "Mish on a Leash."

On the weekend we met up with xenophonique and were introduced to lunarflares, both delightful. We snacked our way through a maple syrup festival*—it's the tail end of maple-tapping season there—before retiring to xen's beautiful apartment for afternoon tea and conversation. A wonderful oasis during our city visit.

We checked out the cemetery and chalet-slash-lookout point atop Mont Royal, accidentally/on purpose got lost in the Underground City, and remarked on how the architecture varied so widely from street to street. We managed three museums:

• The modern art museum, where we inadvertently hit peak Montreal by wandering through their current exhibit on Leonard Cohen. The curators had built literal temples to this guy, from a small wooden cathedral, dark, hushed, in which microphones hung from the ceiling while a recorded chorus hummed "Hallelujah" in surround sound, to a Stonehenge-like ring of video screens of aging men trying to synchronize a recitation of his lyrics, to a "depression room"—"intended as a solo experience"—where, presumably, the people waiting in line would be able to commune with Cohen's spirit one on one.


• The fine arts museum: enormous, impressive, comprehensive. My favorites were the Inuit art floor (and the integration of native and non-native painting and sculpture in other galleries), the contemporary furniture and industrial design collection, and a particular painting at the entrance to a gallery about Canada finding its identity during the initial era of Western "settlement," because this painting, both disturbing and hilarious, portrays the horrors of colonization and fur trapping from the point of view of the beavers. (Perhaps obviously: warning for animal harm.) It is by Kent Monkman, who is part Cree and part Irish and who, I have since learned, paints and sculpts all sorts of striking, subversive subjects, often focusing on mistreatment of native populations and playing with artistic traditions. A+, all beavers go to heaven.


• The natural history museum at McGill, a nice collection of shells, fossils, rocks/minerals, cultural artifacts and taxidermied regional wildlife in an interior hall that reminded me of a couple of English museums of medical curiosities that I visited with deelaundry. xenakis probably knows what it's called, beyond the website's description of "an idiosyncratic expression of eclectic Victorian Classicism." I learned a lot about shrunken-head production.

Oh, plus the botanical gardens, or at least the greenhouse sections, since most of the outdoor beds contained bulb shoots juuust daring to poke through a dusting of snow. The niftiest room showcased fruit and spice plants, from banana and litchi trees to cinnamon and vanilla, star anise, annatto, peppercorns. We had not seen most of those edibles in their natural forms before. Super neat. We intended to visit the neighboring Insectarium but ran out of time, alas. There was a dead centipede waiting in my toothbrush holder when I got home so that probably counted as a consolation prize.

*Okay but seriously ( ALL THE FOOD: )

Now back to regular life: work and chores, reading, radical weather shifts, and hopefully soon, back to vidding.

One of the local Little Free Libraries had a copy of The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman and that finally motivated me to start reading His Dark Materials after all these years. People were super into them around the time we were going to Harry Potter aca-cons and of course there've been a million fannish AUs but I never got around to trying the series, other than going to see that forgettable film adaptation.

After an uncertain start, I got really into it, especially the human-dæmon relationships. I hadn't realized how into it until I found myself choking up at the descriptions of ( spoilery ). Also I hadn't realized how explicitly Pullman described what happens between dæmons when their humans get frisky together. Many years late to this party.

I bought the other two books yesterday and will read them in & around the new Harry Potter one that I pre-ordered but haven't picked up yet.

Obv. there are things to enjoy and things to critique and thinky stuff about Pullman's reaction to C.S. Lewis and the Church but we are not here for in-depth analysis right now. Work is rough these days as we undergo managerial transitions and as a result my entertainment has swung toward pleasure and comfort. See also: I've taken a break from vid-research movies and just rewatched the Twilight series. Well, that's sort of for vid research too, but a different project, and I wasn't taking notes. And I rewatched the beginning of the terrible-but-I-don't-care TV show Roar from 1997, because my heart.

Was sad to miss con.txt this weekend and all the friends who go with it. At least there's only a week and a half 'til Vividcon. Hang in there, self: Hugs and vids and conversation and mini-vacation are nigh.

1. A coworker in all earnestness today was telling me about how she gets shoulder pain from time to time because she sleeps with her arms over her head and it stretches the tissues too far, but she can't control it, so one time she tried tying her elbows to her torso with a bathrobe sash, only she woke up in the middle of the night with her arms over her head and the sash across her throat, so then she tried tying each wrist to its corresponding leg, only she woke up because her arm was straining to pull free. Do you know how hard it was not to respond with anything involving the phrase "self-bondage."

2. At a recent get-together a group of us was talking about a possible local swinging community and the rumor that couples put pineapples on their front porches to indicate their receptiveness to partner swaps. (N.B.: This post makes my office conversations sound much more exciting than they are in reality.) This same coworker, who is a few years older than me, responded with a jovial declaration that her aunt and uncle met swinging. We said, That is an awesome story! Tell us more! And she said, Yeah, they both like swing dancing and they went out one night to the same event. And we said, …We are talking about a different kind of swinging. And she said, What other kind is there? And then her face went an interesting shade of red and she disavowed any knowledge or participation on her relatives' behalf.

3. My friend and her husband brought me a pineapple when they visited yesterday. Based on past conversation I am sure they are not aware of its potential pineappley meaning.

4. SEBASTIAN ROCHÉ, VAMPIRE HUNTER. (?)

…See, the thing is, I got so used to adoring Sebastian when no one knew who he was and he only appeared in occasional movies and TV shows and one Geocities fan page with a purple tiled background and those gif flames that now it's sort of a shock to see the number of Google results and hear that he's on Twitter and find that many friends have heard of him because he's been on Fringe and Supernatural and whatnot these past couple of seasons, not just Roar and Odyssey 5 and the Earthsea miniseries all of which like ten people watched, or General Hospital, which even I didn't watch. Now I, who once managed the only Sebastian Roche fan page domain on the internet, have catch-up to do to see what new info is out there about him. Glory!

I just, I miss his beautiful hair.

(Wow, I sound hyper. Actually it is just the tiredness. [She said, slumped on the couch for the last six hours.] Who needs alcohol to lower inhibitions when one has insomnia-inducing hormones? Also rice pudding.)

I got to hang out for most of the day in a video production studio, and felt no hesitation in asking the guys questions relevant to vidding. And work. But also vidding.

That was a great change of pace. But since the rest of my tasks had to be squeezed in afterwards, I got home almost three hours late. I'm doomed to miss fangirl Fridays forever.

Speaking of vidding, with two free weekends and Veterans Day on the horizon, my fannish goals are to work on either the SGA flashfic or the House WIP from like three years ago that has been late for as many Halloweens, or to work on the SGA vid-in-progress that has a Statement to Make. All gen.

It's been strange and wonderful and a little angsty lately as I slowly open myself up again to a wider variety of interests than I've let myself focus on the last couple of years because of work and school and new career. For example, poetry podcasts at Slate. There is Robert Pinsky -- once upon a time I could do a killer Pinsky impression -- reading an old favorite of mine, "Jubilate Agno," a poem so wonderfully weird that I'm breaking my "no cats on LJ" rule to recommend it to you now if you don't know it. I miss poetry so much.

ETA: And nobody told me that was the wrong link! Fixed now. It had linked to another neat article at Slate, about the Levi's commercials that've been using Whitman poems.

And I read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, finally. Beautiful and horrific, and messes with your head with its unresolved arguments about storytelling and truth and war and writing. Is what he wrote true? What is "true"? Does it matter? Why? Just don't read before bed, alone, in the dark, like I kept doing. The ghosts feel closer that way. Or actually, maybe that's the perfect way to do it.

Starting to watch movies again, too. TV has lately been good for stuff like New York City Serenade (Sebastian!) (dir. Frank Whaley, RSL's old buddy), Ordinary People, a documentary about Bon Jovi, and an Alien marathon. Now the nearby American Film Institute is having a European film festival, and I think I'll pick up some tickets. Any recommendations from the AFI calendar? (Euro are in blue.) I am thinking some combination of Piggies, Dragon, Parnassus, John Rabe, Infer, Disco, maybe Bluebeard or Ander.

Music, only a little. There aren't many radio stations in the area. At least at this new job you can stream radio, so I've been putting the classical station on quietly in the background. (Once upon a time, I thought of comparing fanfiction to radio, where gen was classical -- people keep thinking they don't think like it, but when they start listening to it, it's hard to go back to the other stuff -- darkfic was the heavy metal/alt rock stations, fluff was easy listening, meta was NPR or talk radio, and the everyday forgettable sort of average stories were the pop stations. And of course a ton of them are love songs.)

Anyway, took a walk down memory lane this week when Richard Shindell rolled into town(ish) on his annual fall tour. Fellow folk singer Antje Duvekot opened. I hadn't heard of her, nor had I heard of last year's opener, Caroline Herring, but from now on I'm trusting his taste because I enjoyed them both and loved at least one song from each ("Sex Bandaid" from Antje, which I sadly can't find on YouTube, and "Paper Gown" by Caroline).

Richard's show was maybe my least favorite of the times I've seen him, front-loaded on the new album and heavy with the more repetitive, blander stuff. Blander to me, anyway; those songs always get requested when he takes requests. He forgot lyrics more than usual, too. Still, he's always a pleasure to listen to. He did do "Mavis," and a punchy minor-chord rendition of the usually bluegrass "Waiting for the Storm" made the whole show worth it. If he'd recorded it that way, the song would be in my top ten. I wish I could find a recording of that version.

I know I've pushed his stuff on you before, but here is some more. Or rather, here is a lot of it again. hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=W082KLK6 (change the x's)

( Zip contains: )

ETA: Oh, Dee, duh, I was going to include "Fishing," one of the great extended metaphors of modern folk. Says me.

Wow, this post took much longer to write than it should have.

Apparently this has been making the rounds for a while, but I hadn't seen it and maybe you haven't either: a gorgeous piece of House/Wilson / Holmes/Watson fanart. Someone in the comments made a good point about Vicodin/cocaine too. I think quality-wise it's right up there with this other painting of the TNG crew in Arthurian roles that Henry Jenkins put on the cover of Textual Poachers.

catilinarian is flying in tomorrow for what will doubtless be a weekend of good conversation and media gluttony, plus "Lestat" on Saturday and -- isn't she lucky? -- our dance competition Sunday at me ol' stomping grounds. It's odd; after and despite that initial string of dreams about the play, and even though we're seeing it on what is now opening night, I haven't been very excited about "Lestat." Mayhap it's protection against disappointment.

For instance, I'm much more excited about "House" lately, especially an upcoming ep in which ( spoiler, obviously ) The show is FINALLY back next week, with Samantha Mathis guest-starring to boot, and then 7 more non-stop eps to follow which are sure to completely contradict whatever I come up with for my ficathon assignment. (I've already seen on the Fox website that ( another spoiler, if you count something posted on the official website ) It's been a while since I've been excited over upcoming episodes of a show, and even longer since I've gone in search of spoilers. It's nice.

In other random fangirl news, Thomas Kretschmann has just started filming a new movie in St. Petersburg called "In Transit" with Daniel Brühl, John Malkovich and Vera Farmiga. Kretschmann! Brühl! Farmiga (Sebastian Roché's wife)! It's worth braving Malkovich! It seems TK is the main character in the movie, which is about German POWs (what a novel role for him) from the siege of Leningrad in a Russian camp guarded by women. His soldier/professor is in love with Farmiga's female prison guard. It's a dream match I never would have thought up, and so very nearly TK and Sebastian... who have probably met on set... *Less than a day after her first migraine aura, she drifts off into her first RPS daydream.*