Saturday, May 24, 2008

Random LA activities

Celebrity sighting: John Slattery, my second Desperate Housewives castmember sighting (first being Marcia Cross last year). Kind of odd, it seems like celebrities try to avoid being seen and thus avoid eye contact, and he did have a baseball cap, but he looked me right in the eye. He's one of those guys who has small roles in lots of things, so maybe he's not enough of a celebrity to avoid being recognized.

LA Phil: Bartok, Music For Strings, Percussion, and Celesta; Dutilleux, Tout un monde lointain; and Stravinsky, Symphony in Three Movements. An enjoyable program with great seats. I last heard Lynn Harrell play the Dutilleux, and his big style of playing differed from Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen's rather introverted performance.

Movies: Indiana Jones :) very silly, very Indiana Jones, but I loved it! And I still love hearing the theme. Although I found the alien stuff a little annoying. Iron Man was also good, and I particularly enjoyed the fact that there was a scene shot at Disney Hall. And I netflixed yet another action adventure, Hellboy, after I saw that it was done by
Guillermo del Toro, whose movie Pan's Labyrinth I loved. I really liked Hellboy a lot, I have to say. It's a little different from your other hero movies, and I love the creatures in it, just as I liked those in Pan's Labyrinth. On the non-action level, I also netflixed The Grapes of Wrath, which was also excellent. Henry Fonda sure was a handsome fellow, though I think I prefer him in color (eg, Once Upon a Time in the West) so you can see those blue eyes :) Movies I am looking forward to this summer: Hellboy II, The Dark Knight, Sex and the City. I like my indy movies (did I mention Waitress?), but now that school's out I am enjoying the frivolous more :)

Reading: All The Pretty Horses

Playing: Prokofiev Quintet !! yay! And I just got the Bach Cello Suites arranged for English horn, which I've been enjoying. I thought for a long time that it was somewhat sacrilegious to play them not on cello, but basses, violas, and well, pretty much everyone else borrows them, so why not EH? And since EH actually has a somewhat similar sound quality to cello, it's really not so bad. Though I feel sorry for my cellist roommate, who already spent all of last semester listening to me hack through the prelude to the second suite on viola (which I could not play in tune for my life! and it's one thing if you can't hear that you're out of tune, but quite painful if you can but just can't get your fingers to do what you need them to do).

Also playing: tennis! with said rooomate :) lots of fun, but also very sore :( since I haven't played in two years. I really want to get a bike, too, but I need to find a cheap one, maybe on craigslist.


So, no school = some practicing, but mainly just having lots of fun. Until I get back from Sarasota and have to find a job. Although I still hope to take a week off from everything when I get back and maybe take a road trip to San Fancisco? We'll see. I figure I should enjoy my time off because who knows the next time I will have a real vacation?

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