This Side of Lost

Yep. I don't blog much. Here are a smattering of important things you may not have picked up:

It seems like just as we are starting to get settled somewhere, we need to move on. Samantha's job is over. I didn't mention it at the time, but it was a temporary two-year position. When she took it, we though there would be a good chance she would be extended beyond the two-year term. But things have changed a bit since then. So now she's unemployed. There are some decent prospects as far as a new gig, but none of them have come to anything yet.

Because she no longer works 90 miles away from where I do, there's no point in living in Danbury anymore. So we'll need to move soon. It will probably be much nearer to where I work, since we don't know where Samantha will be for a while. While this is a good thing -- we've never felt like Danbury is a great place to live and it will be nice to actually live where I work again -- moving is about my least favorite thing ever. But at least we'll be waiting until the new year to do it.

The more we move around, and the farther into the past my Minnesota residency fades, the more it becomes clear that I'd really like to move back there. So can you please keep an eye open for any rare book cataloging jobs in the Twin Cities?

As I mentioned here previously, I don't post here much, especially since Twitter does a good job fulfilling much of my desire to publicly proclaim the meaningless minutiae of my life. But it occurs to me that some tweets just aren't long enough to appropriately share the more important events. So here's some annotated tweets from the past, oh, five months or so:

• Andrew is at the Wang Theater (snicker snicker) in Boston watching his sister graduate. My sister graduated from college! Yay! My parents came to town for the event, so we went up to Boston and stayed in Gloucester (again) for a few days to celebrate with her. Now she's in Washington, DC, trying to make a living as a photographer, and not doing too shabby a job so far.
• Andrew is at St. Olaf for the first time in five years and is loving it. Two of my friends from college got married! Yay! We went to Minnesota to watch. It happened at St. Olaf. So Samantha got to see the place for the first time and we got to hang out with a bunch of cool people, eat tasty food and have a good time.

Okay, that list ended up being a lot shorter than I thought. But that's because I only need 140 characters to tell you about my birthday, or the roller derby. Or maybe because we're just really boring. Who knows. So, see you again in six weeks or so!

Vicente Minnelli directs this 1951 musical classic, starring Gene Kelly as American expat painter Jerry Mulligan, who falls in love with young French ingenue Lise Bouvier (Leslie Caron). Nina Foch, Oscar Levant and a boatload of Gershwin tunes co-star.

We've been watching a lot of Gene Kelly lately. This isn't really surprising if you know Samantha at all, who more or less claims Kelly as her favorite classic movie star -- you know, from the era when movie stars were actually talented. This has been helped along by a Christmas gift from her brother Ben. But even if you're not a big Gene Kelly fan, this film is more than worth seeing.

First of all, let's get this out of the way: yes, there's a 17 minute ballet segment near the end that features no dialogue whatsoever. And yes, if you don't dig superb dancing, beautiful sets based on the works of prominent French painters and Gershwin music, you'll probably be bored. We thought we would be and we weren't. It's awesome.

The segment is emblematic of why this film is on the list. Gene Kelly's career with MGM was on the rise at a stratospheric pace, to peak with Singin' in the Rain the following year. Partially because of Kelly's influence, MGM was willing to take bigger chances on the size and scope of the movie musical, and this film is evidence that it was a good bet. The musical numbers, the sets, the large cast -- no expenses were spared. And it works. The film is a joy to watch -- a riot of color and energy.

The plot is forgettable, but you're not here for the plot -- you're here for everything else, and mostly that's Kelly. I know we're a bit biased, but I'm hard pressed to think of anyone in the current day and age that has the range of talent that he did. Between choreography, dancing, singing, acting, writing and directing, he was a showman to the hilt. Caron, trained as a dancer before making her film debut in the film, provides Kelly with a dancer partner more than up to the task. The Gershwin soundtrack is also worth the price of admission, and indeed ties the film together thematically better than the plot does structurally.

If you're going to watch one Gene Kelly film... well, watch Singin' in the Rain. But if you're going to watch two, watch this one as well.

(See this post if you're confused why I'm reviewing movies.)

The hiking we did on our trip to Acadia was the beginning of what's becoming a new favorite hobby for us. You know someone is getting serious about something when they drop a bunch of dough on it, which we did last month when we bought new shoes and a trail guide. We've been on five hikes since Acadia:

• Huntington State Park, Redding, CT. Our first hiking venture here in Connecticut and probably the closest hiking trails to our place of residence. 2.5 miles along the blue, green, red and white trails. The trails here were wide and multipurpose, as we saw evidence of horseback riding and mountain biking along the way. The terrain is nice and we should go back at some point to do more exploring.
• Fahnestock State Park, Putnam County, NY. We walked the Catfish Loop (4.9 miles) at this sprawling New York state park with our friends Laura and Sara and their dog Ellie. All in all not a scintillating hike, but a pleasant enough trail on a nice day.
• Appalachian Trail, Hoyt Rd to Bulls Bridge. Our first time on the venerable AT was 4 miles or so of trail from the New York-Connecticut border to Bulls Bridge, CT, which is actually a covered bridge and a bit of a local attraction. A nice up-and-down Ten Mile Hill and beautiful views of the Housatonic River, which was swollen and rushing from all the rain.
• Lillinonah Trail, Newtown, CT. Our first Blue Blazed trail hike, we followed it from one parking area to the other, about 3.9 miles or so, along the shore of Lake Lillinonah. The trail, as noted on the website, is a bit steep, plus it was hot and buggy, which made this an exhausting hike, but a rewarding one.
• Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, Cross River, NY. We took an approximately 5 mile hike out of one of the several guide books I've been getting from Interlibrary Loan. An easy hike along wide trails, this reminded us of Huntington State Park, except not as strenuous. We took a side trail called Leatherman's Loop to see one of the caves that the infamous Leatherman slept in on his wanderings.

So that's what we've been up to on many weekend mornings recently. Have any suggestions for good hiking nearby?

Yeah, that didn't last long, did it?

If you're a regular reader here, you probably know that I'm an obsessive fan of Storyhill, a two-dudes-two-guitars band from Montana/Minnesota. How obsessive, you say? Well, I own a domain name which houses a sporadically updated fan site. But also, on the occasion of a friend of mine becoming a fan (thanks to me, of course), I decided to feed her growing interest by finishing a project I've had in my head for a while now: a Storyhill greatest hits album.

I sent it to her a couple weeks ago, so I figured I'd also post it here. The track list is in reverse chronological order by album, followed by the order they appear on the album. What do you think, Storyhill fans? Did I leave anything out?

1. Give Up The Ghost (from Storyhill)
2. Paradise Lost (from Storyhill)
3. Seven Sisters (from Dovetail)
4. What Was Wrong (from Dovetail)
5. Angel (from Dovetail)
6. All I Need (from Dovetail)
7. Inside Emotion (from Echoes)
8. Great Divide (from Echoes)
9. Somewhere In Between (from Storyhill Live)
10. Let The Wind Come In (from Storyhill Live)
11. Steady On (from Storyhill Live)
12. White Roses (from This Side of Lost)
13. Mary On the Mountain (from This Side of Lost)
14. Spaces (from This Side of Lost)
15. Absaroka Air (from Clearing)
16. Tremblin' Tracks (from Clearing)
17. Loose Summer Clothes (from Clearing)
18. I-90 (from Miles and Means)
19. Parallel Lives (from Miles and Means)
20. If I Could (from Miles and Means)
21. Boulder River (from Miles and Means)

I started this blog nearly five years ago. It was long enough ago that I refused to call it a blog. It was a weblog. The word blog still had that new and slightly condescending neologistic feel to it that I hated. Now my browser's spell-check accepts blog but balks at weblog. Strange.

I'm kind of over blogging, my friends. I wanted to use this to keep in touch with my far flung friends upon my exodus from Minnesota, and it was okay at that for a while. But that was before tools like my friends' private web forum and Facebook came along. And they seem to do the job much better.

So what's left? Posting weird stuff I find on the Internet? I'm certainly not the best person doing that. And when I do have something to share, it's not like a whole post is really necessary. Facebook (and Twitter) is better for that. Okay, so reviews of AFI 100 movies? Folks, we've been at it for four years and we're only just reached the 1/3rd mark. My backlog of reviews is probably what's been holding us back.

It's not just the dearth of content, though. My life wasn't terribly exciting in library school, so it's not like it's gotten even less so. But somehow, being married and having a job make it a lot tougher to find the time and brain-space to devote to this thing. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Just a change.

I don't know. I guess I'm saying that you shouldn't really have any more expectations for this space. If you're curious what's going on in my life, friend me on Facebook. Or pick up the phone, for heaven's sake. Don't we all have free long distance now? If you want more day-to-day stuff, follow me on Twitter (Twitter posts since my last blog post: 86). Whatever else I feel like posting here will get posted.

So I'll see you elsewhere? Good. Signing off.

In February, Samantha and I discussed the fact that we couldn't remember the last time we had a vacation that wasn't also a trip for some other reason, like visiting family for the holidays or going to a conference or a wedding. So we made plans to fix that. And two weeks ago we had a lovely mini-vacation in Bar Harbor, Maine, and Acadia National Park.

I didn't know the place existed before February and now it's one of my favorite places ever. The town and most of the park are located on Mt. Desert Island on the Atlantic Coast and it's just beautiful country. Apparently everyone already knows this, as the place has been the vacation spot for the rich and famous for decades and does quite a healthy tourist business in the summer months.

Lucky for us, it wasn't quite the summer months yet and we almost had the place entirely to ourselves. We showed up at our chosen lodgings, the Coach Stop Inn bed and breakfast after a quick seven hour drive to find that we are the only guests there. Acadia itself only opened fully the day before, and the carriage roads were still closed to biking due to the spring thaw. Venturing into town, we found many of the local merchants still closed for the winter.

However I can safely say that very little of this had any effect on our experience. True, we didn't get to do any biking or kayaking, but if we had, I might have missed out on my favorite part of the trip: our two hikes.

I had never gone hiking in any serious sense before, and I'm sorry I've been missing out for so long. Friday and Saturday morning were spent on the trails headed up and down Gorham and Beech Mountain, respectively. Admittedly, they're not so much mountains as much as overgrown hills (525 and 839 feet), but they're the only mountains I've ever climbed, so I'll stick with mountains. Anyway, I had a great time following the trails, scrambling over rocks and trekking through forests. The weather was absolutely perfect (in the low 60s most of the time) and we barely spotted another soul out on the trails. Very peaceful and yet an excellent workout.

The workout part we needed, especially, after the three course breakfasts we were served at our B&B. Which were completely amazing. I think they called this Eggs Napoleon. I didn't get a picture of the blueberry fritters, their signature dish and the first course of each breakfast. That's probably because we were wolfing them down so fast. Samantha picked the place partially because of the excellent breakfasts, and they didn't disappoint. Overall we highly recommend the Coach Stop Inn.

Hiking and breakfast were the highlights for me, but the whole weekend was a smash hit. The weather cooperated beautifully the entire time. We enjoyed some less strenuous touring of the park and the island, driving up Cadillac Mountain, walking along the shore and across the "bar" at low tide. We even got some culture at a local Native American museum and did a little shopping. We had delicious food all over the place, sampling among the open eating establishments in Bar Harbor and a couple of Yelp-approved spots in Portland on the way there and back.

All in all it was a great trip. We felt recharged heading back home. And I have a new hiking addiction to feed.

The current funniest thing on the Internet for me is Miranda Sings. Miranda is a singer from Tacoma, WA, who is just trying to make a name for herself using nothing but her talent, her drive for success, and some YouTube videos. Check out her rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner. You can even learn how to sing like her from her free voice lesson!

Before you click, though, I should warn you that her videos are not for the faint of heart. And by "heart" I mean "musical appreciation." Because Miranda is terrible. She can't sing on key, with or without accompaniment. Her vocal technique is cringe-worthy. Her musicianship is off the scale -- the low end, that is. My poor wife usually can't make it through 30 seconds of her videos.

But what isn't entirely clear (to many of the commenters on YouTube especially) is that Miranda is a joke: she's a character created and played, as best I can gather, by Colleen Ballinger, a recent Azusa Pacific University graduate in vocal performance. Colleen has some YouTube videos that display her interest in contemporary Broadway fare, and in them, she's just fine; she's even pretty good, if you like that sort of thing. But I'm somewhat sad to say that her future may be in comedy, because Miranda's lampoon of self-obsessed singers in the age of YouTube is spot on.

This hits my sweet spot for Internet weirdness for a number of reasons. First off, the videos in and of themselves are so bad you can't help but laugh. And once you understand it's satire, you add that level of humor (one that's particularly appealing to me, because I can't stand singers with an ego). But I love love love the reactions. The usual "OMG your terrible" ones are good, but there are people trying to correct her "advice" in the voice lesson, or telling her what she's doing wrong... they're all just so earnest in their criticism. And then there are the people who get the joke, who post the supportive comments! I love it. Plus, I have so many friends who really are professional musicians, and some of them are just as taken in as the broader public. Fantastic.

Go Miranda. And haters, back off. You're just jealous.

Yay, baseball is here! Here are some baseball related things.

• The Twins have a winning record so far. They're even leading the AL Central! I have to say this now in case it is not true for the rest of the year. Though honestly, I have no idea what will happen in the Central this year, as it is a pretty weak division currently.
• Where we live, Boston or in New York are the two easiest options for seeing the Twins live without traveling extreme distances. Unfortunately, we won't be seeing them at all, because all of the games at both locations are sold out of moderately priced tickets. And since it's basically legal to scalp tickets now, there were thousands of tickets available online, but I loathe and despise the ticket resale industry and refuse to support it by buying tickets from a third party. So in all likelihood we won't be seeing the Twins in person this year.
• Our fancy new flat screen TV has a VGA input, which means we can watch anything on the computer on it. Including Twins games via MLB.tv. We watched a bit of last night's game this way and the picture's not bad for our mediocre DSL bandwidth.
• This also means fantasy baseball has begun. I'm playing in my regular league, which is comprised of many friends from St. Olaf. It's an extremely competitive league and my draft didn't turn out as well as I would have hoped. I was feeling pretty down about this, so on a whim, I went and joined another league right before the season started. It's a rather shallow public league, and I anticipate that it will be a good antidote and confidence builder compared to the soul-crushing difficulty of my regular league.

And finally, my least favorite thing about baseball -- when a young player gets his chance at stardom snatched away before he's even had a chance to try. Rest in peace, Nick.

Yes, folks, it's another western (and not the last). This 1953 entry stars Alan Ladd as the titular character, a mysterious gunslinger who gets embroiled in a conflict between a homesteading family (played by Van Helfin and Jean Arthur) and a ruthless cattle baron. George Stevens directs.

Okay, okay, okay. I'm starting to come around on the westerns. I have disliked all of the westerns we've seen for this project, but I dislike this one less. I think the gap between viewing and reviewing this film (I saw it last May) actually helped because it seems better looking back. I gave it 2 stars on Netflix back then, but I changed that to a 3 while writing this review. How's that for growth?

Shane has many of the hallmarks of a good western: the simple story that never plays out as simple as it sounds, the universal moral conflicts of good vs. evil played out by people who aren't quite either, and the vast, breathtaking and imposing landscapes that frame it all. I have seen these now several times and am beginning to understand the subtleties of how they are used to good effect.

One thing that I think Shane has in abundance over other westerns are the characters. We've seen plenty of morally ambiguous characters, but everyone in this movie felt real instead of just needlessly complex. Shane himself is a hero, yes, but one who knows the same heroic qualities than enable him to save the day are the same qualities that mean he must not stay, leading to the heartbreaking and iconic final scene as the young boy who has idolized Shane implores him to come back as he rides away.

The relationships that develop between Shane and his adopted family members are natural, and the consequences that ensue due to the story make intuitive sense. I enjoyed the interplay between Shane and the family, between the family and the other homesteaders, between Shane and the ranchers. It seemed well constructed. We don't have to like the way the film turns out, but it is satisfying nonetheless.

The characters also appealed to me in a fashion that has been honed by many years of reading comic books and fantasy novels and playing computer games. I always enjoy seeing characters who are obviously powerhouses in their particular realm of existence match up against one another. If you rated every character in the movie on a gunslinging scale from 1 to 10, it's obvious that Shane gets a 10. Jack Wilson (played by a young and fantastic Jack Palance) gets a 9, which is plenty good enough to have him be a nigh-unstoppable force of evil in the movie. But Shane will get the best of him, and does. This is despite, or perhaps even because of, Shane's awareness of the Spider-Man Credo ("With great power comes great responsibility").

This curiously mechanical viewpoint on conflict is something I see and enjoy in a lot of media, so the fact that I get this feeling from this film isn't really unusual, but I figured it bore mentioning anyway.

So yeah. It's still a western, which means it is automatically hokey, backwards and artificial to me. The themes could have been easily explored in some other genre that I would have enjoyed watching more. But as far as westerns go, it was okay.

(See this post if you're confused why I'm reviewing movies.)