Hannah and Vicki

So I made a promise to my suitemate a few weeks ago that I would write a blog post all about her one day, and then a similar promise to my roommate a few weeks after that, so here is a blog about both of them.

Vicki is my Latina, math-major, cheerleader suitemate. She can say lots of Spanish words like "hola" and "como estas" and she likes queso. She is also a grader for her math class, and I like listening to her talk about how much she enjoys grading, because I feel like it is preparing me for the teaching world. She especially likes it when she can't read the students' handwriting, or their answers make no sense whatsoever and she has to decipher what they were doing. She also really enjoys astronomy lab, a class that we take together, and we can always point out Jupiter in the sky, and measure where it is against the stars Fomalhaut and Algenib, which is a useful skill. You can use it to impress people at parties, as our astronomy professor says. The best part of our day, however, is when we come back to the dorm after all of our classes and watch Criminal Minds in the evening. Also, I never know how to spell her name. Sometimes it's Viki, or Vicky, or Victoria.

Hannah is my roommate. She likes food, purple, and Winnie the Pooh. We have movie nights together where we introduce each other to our favorite movies: I got to see American Beauty (starring Kevin Spacey and winner of five Academy Awards) and Life is Beautiful (an Italian WWII movie, winner of three Academy Awards including Best Foreign Film) during two of our movie nights. She also likes very spicy food that I can't eat. We also like lots of similar music, like oldies, classic rock, and the soundtrack to Amelie. Sometimes we make up stories to tell each other before we go to sleep at night. The rules are that one of us chooses the protagonist (name and species) of the story, and the other one has to tell the story. The two most memorable stories have involved a mushroom named Harold and an earplug named Murray. And we both like Bruce Willis and think he's very manly.

Sometimes, we hang out together, all three of us. After Criminal Minds is over at midnight, there are lots of infomercials on tv and last night, the people on the programming were selling cds of music by people like Carol King, Elton John, The Mamas and the Papas, and James Taylor (and other artists like that), and we spent a good half hour singing along to the clips of songs that played. It made me very happy.

Memories of things that are silly like that make me happy in general. I was talking with Hannah last night about this last night, that some random events make me feel happy, and feel like even if everything goes wrong, I still have great friends who are there to support me. I like staying up late and talking about silly things!  Everyone should go out and do fun things with their friends like sing along to infomercials or make up stories or measure stars and planets. It gives you a good feeling.

Film Score Buffet

November is a very big birthday month, namely because it's nine months after February. So, a very happy birthday to everyone who has a November birthday! 

I thought I would write about music today, because I feel like it. Each paragraph talks about one or two composers, and gives musical examples, so feel free to skip to whichever looks interesting! I just like talking about music.

Well, I saw the movie Ponyo (yes, the English dubbed one) over the weekend, which happens to be absolutely adorable, and it had an excellent soundtrack by Joe Hisaichi (who composes for anything that Miazaki dicrects).  Here are some of my favorite soundtrack composers:

• Joe Hisaichi
• Hans Zimmer
• James Horner
• Yoko Kanno
• Howard Shore
• Philip Glass
• Michael Giacchino
• Danny Elfman

I'm sure I've left some out. But the point is that Hisaichi definitely makes that list. His Princess Mononoke soundtrack is particularly interesting-- it's very epic-sounding and varied, with instruments ranging from taiko drums to adagio strings, and pieces written for full symphonies pieces solely for vocals. Here is an example of one of my favorites-- Lady Eboshi-- set to a solar eclipse, no less! (no, seriously, I just liked the quality of the track here). On the subject of Japanese soundtrack composers, find a copy of Yoko Kanno's soundtrack to the TV anime series Wolf's Rain, which is simply exquisite. If you only get one track, Leaving on Red Hill is beautiful, simple, and calming (and it has a gorgeous oboe, and I just love oboes).

Leaving the subject of mellow music, Zimmer and Elfman have something in common, which has to do with the catchy and dramatic themes that seem to follow in their wake. Zimmer is, of course, most well-known for his score to Gladiator and the Academy Award-winning The Lion King, while his protege, Klaus Badelt, wrote the score to Pirates of the Carribbean (any soundtrack lover or movie enthusiast will be able to point out the similarities in the scores of Pirates and Gladiator). I'm going to share a more obscure piece of his-- Roll Tide, from the movie Crimson Tide. The first few minutes are a crescendo of the main theme, and the last few minutes contain a beautiful and haunting rendition of the Navy Hymn tune Melita, or Eternal Father Strong to Save. Elfman (most known for The Nightmare Before Christmas, any Edward Scissorhands, and the recently Academy Award nominated Milk), tends to fall away from Zimmer's grandiose style and focus more on the smaller, quirkier styles, namely synthesized vocals. Elfman also wrote the TV themes for Desparate Housewives and The Simpsons. Here is a piece from one of his rare independent works-- a soprano/alto piece in Spanish called "I Forget", part of a six-movement symphony (the Serenada Schizophrana). I always associate them together because of the appeal they often seem to have for people only vaguely interested in the music industry.

Another composer along these lines is James Horner, who of course wrote for Titanic (the best selling film score soundtrack of all time) and most recently Avatar which along with Titanic ranks as the highest grossing movie of all time. Despite the criticism he has received for his music being overly popular/plebeian, I thought because of his amazing success (and luck), he was worth mention. And I'll say it: I like his music. His first Academy Award nomination was for the Alien movies, which is remarkably different from his massively epic later works-- very quiet and eerie (matching the tone of the movies, of course). This is an amusing comparison that I found on youtube of several of his soundtracks. As much as I love him, I have to agree with another large criticism about how he tends to repeat his themes throughout movies. This just compares Glory, Titanic, and Avatar; however, I've noticed a theme almost note-for-note that repeats in Avatar from the movie Troy-- for example, compare the part where Troy is being destroyed to the part where the Hometree falls. Exact same theme.  Anyway, overall, I do love James Horner.

Philip Glass has always been an independent composer before a soundtrack composer. He follows the school of minimalism, which usually means music with a very repetitive structure. An iconic soundtrack example of his music is The Illusionist, during which you can hear how the structure doesn't change much throughout each track (and arguably during the entire movie), and yet it doesn't grow old or tiresome. It keeps you on the edge of your seat until the very end. This is a violin concerto that he wrote in the last years of the twentieth century. The first three minutes build up to a beautiful climax of swiftly played motif, and in the fourth minute, multiple violins are added to create an exquisite symphonic picture. 

Lastly, I tend to put Giacchino and Shore in the same group as well because of their versatility-- both are Academy Award winners who have scored an astonishingly wide range of soundtracks. Shore is most well known for his Lord of the Rings Trilogy, but since he composed for this trilogy, his career has gone uphill. He composed for recent positively received movies since then such as Doubt, Eastern Promises, The Departed, A History of Violence, and yes, the recent Twilight movie Eclipse. Similarly, Giacchino, who is perhaps is currently most well known for his award-winning score to Up, also scored for the entire TV series Lost, the recent Star Trek movie, Mission Impossible III, and the very well-received score to The Incredibles. To celebrate his recent Oscar, I'm going to post the main theme to the movie Up, called Married Life.

My track for Shore going to be from LOTR, but it is not going to my favorite track or even what I think is the most popular track.  This is just the music that I feel like posting right now, so I'm going to go ahead and post it. It's one of the best parts of the trilogy for me, from both the book and the movie. 

Anyway, I realize this was a long post, but I hope anyone reading this will enjoy even just one or two tracks of the music!

Ollie's New Look

"I found a car tipped over in the jungle... And we could totally fix it and get it going again. Why? Because it'll be fun." -Hurley, Lost

                                                                      This is Ollie:

                                            

                                   

                                                            This is Ollie's new look:

                                                     

Ollie is my baby tiger. His real name is Olvar, which means "plants" in Elvish. He has an older brother named Kel (short for "Kelvar" which means "animals" in Elvish), but Kel is missing at the moment, and we can't find him. Ollie misses Kel a lot, so today I thought I'd make him a jersey so that he would get his mind off of Kel for a little bit. He seems to really have taken to it.  The mess in the second picture is from all the sewing, ironing, and fabric-shaping that went on this afternoon, in the process of making his jersey.

We wore our jerseys together for the Mu Phi Epsilon meeting tonight, and I thought we made a pretty good pair:

When you feel as if a lot has happened to you, and it's very overwhelming (like if you have an older brother named Kel who's a tiger that you can't find at the moment), you look for very little things that make you happy, and you will find them.  Like sewing a jersey for a stuffed animal. That took me most of the afternoon, and guess what? I enjoyed it. I felt guilty about enjoying it-- for a moment, I had a sudden horrible thought that I wasn't allowed to enjoy things while going through a difficult time. But I really am. That's ok. It's a good thing.

I can enjoy staying up late and talking with friends even though I have a paper due the next morning. I can enjoy learning a new piece on the piano even if it's the most largo piece I've ever heard. It's still beautiful. I can enjoy watching the Tyra show after classes even if it's trash tv. And when I got my suitemate to drive me to Borders on Monday only to find that the book I was looking for was out of stock and it would take six weeks to order? We simply drove to Whole Foods and got lots of expensive cheese instead. Our trip was going to be successful, dammit. And we enjoyed it!

It's much easier to look ahead if you don't look too far ahead. Just keep thinking of the next minute, the next hour. They will turn into days, weeks, months, years on their own. You don't have to worry about that. Just keep going minute by minute, and keep finding the little things that make you smile, and the rest will happen without your worrying.

When I stepped out the door this morning wearing my jersey, my suitemate commented that Ollie (nestled in a side-pocket of my backpack) needed a jersey to match mine, and he was so excited for the rest of the day about that idea that I just couldn't let him down. So I came back after my classes and made him a Mu Phi jersey after watching Tyra. And my thumb was bleeding from the needle, and there were pieces of fabric and thread all over the room, and the water had spilled all over the carpet from the leaking iron.

And Ollie and I were both pleased.

We won today.