Sholay

Due to a lot of distractions in life, I accidentally got one of the Netflix movies I keep in the queue for the rare times when Jean and Renee are out of town. This movie, Sholay, is billed as a 'curry Western', and clocks in at a leisurely 199 minutes! I didn't watch it all in one sitting (in fact I watched several patches while walking on a treadmill), but I did finish it.

Let me tell you, there is nothing quite like watching a Bollywood interpretation of Sergio Leone's ouvre, with a dash of The Magnificent Seven thrown in, all the while boosting your spirits with whimsical Bollywood musical numbers!

Jean wondered how I endured it, but in truth, I enjoyed it, and am glad I picked it up. Thanks to whoever put together that list of seminal Bollywood movies!

Two New Albums

Broken Bells - Broken Bells. This is a new collaboration for Danger Mouse (of Gnarls Barkley fame), this time with James Mercer, of The Shins. Sounds promising.

Battles - Battles. This is a band which features members of Don Caballero, another band which I enjoy, so I thought I'd take a stab at it.

Vancouver

Update

I'm pinning this post to the top of the weblog for a few days until I have a chance to complete my photo kibutzing. The biggest delay to getting them online is that Jean wanted my most recent photo on Flickr! to be a clue in Renee's Easter Egg Hunt. Since my bundle of trip photos amounts to 221 photos (out of a total of 558 taken), that would have been quite the Easter Egg hunt!

Anyway, the banner photo commemorates our trip, with Jean and Renee posing at the entrance to Granville Island market. You can find the complete photo set labelled Spring Break 2010. I hope to create a number of subsets for the various attractions we visited. Given how long it took to get this set together, don't hold your breath...

P.S.:While not being much of a photographer, I still got a lot of pictures I really enjoyed. The aquarium was a real pleasure, so besides some neat images of Jean and Renee, is possibly my favorite photo of the trip (until I change my mind). You can click through to here for larger versions.

Original Post

I'm gonna put a placeholder here for notes on our trip to Vancouver. When I get a bit more time I'll try to cull through some of our photos and get them up online.

We went for a whirlwind tour over Spring Break with Renee. We actually had to produce passports, though they don't stamp them for crossings to and from Canada. The border agent told me we could get a stamp in the visitor center. Went in and they said "they always say that!" Bastards!

Anyway, we had a lot of fun, and stopped by Seattle on the way home. Now it's back to work, so pictures will probably be awhile coming.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes

I finished The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes last night. This was the second story collection Renee was reading from last term for school. She didn't have to read the entire book to satisfy her requirements, but I did.

Unfortunately, it is also the short story collection which ends in The Final Problem, the story where Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill of Holmes so he could move on to other, 'better' works.

I never set myself the goal of rereading this entire collection, but was enjoying it enough that I would take my iPod to bed and read part of a story to get sleepy. Having finished with the death of Sherlock Holmes, I feel that I want to get past that point, and so, I'm starting up The Return of Sherlock Holmes. I'll at least read the resurrection story, The Empty House.

Recent Movies

Departures is a Japanese movie about a concert cellist who has to find another job when his orchestra is disbanded. He returns to his home town and ends up getting a job preparing the dead for burial. I found it very emotional, and recommend it.

A Serious Man is another Coen brothers movie, a fairly grim drama with no happy endings in sight. Maybe on a day when you're looking for something to confirm your pessimism.

It turns out that all those people who have been talking up The Wire were not mistaken. This is a pretty damn good show about the cops and drug dealers in Baltimore. Jean and I are watching it between movies.

Raw Photo Dump

I've dumped three new batches of photos onto Flickr:

• Llloyd Center Diabetes Convention


• H-Mart Food Prep


• Portland Coliseum Home Show

I uploaded them raw/unedited (I think they're pretty much all from the P&S, hence originally JPEGs), then did some brief touch-ups using the online Picnic photo editor. I chose this route rather than the more time consuming local Photoshop routine, because they've been sitting on my computer for two or three weeks, and I have a new batch of photos that I want to spend a little more time tweaking. More on that later.

Musical Lapses

Okay, I know I've been on vacation from the weblog, and even when I do attend to it, I'm just using it as offboard memory, i.e. to remind me what I've recently seen on Netflix, or grabbed from eMusic, for instance. Guess what? This is another one of those posts!

I'm just starting it here to remind me to fish out the past few albums when I get home, but as I'm at work, I'll keep it short. I just wanted to note the new album I'm listening to right now:

The Edge of the Forest - Darren Johnston

Oddly, Darren is not in the Big Fat Book of Jazz, which gave me some pause. Is he a fly-by-night Jazz scammer? But the samples on eMusic sounded intriguing, so I decided to take a chance, and grabbed the whole thing (I know, eMusic bumped prices, how can I justify such a wild gamble? Just a fool for music, I guess...).

It's pretty avant-garde, and I'm not sure if it is going to grow on me, or 'go' on me, if you catch my meaning. But I'm attracted/repelled by the first composition, "Be the Frog", a nine minute journey from Gershwin to Cage to Carl Stalling (where is my damn Carl Stalling Project CD???) to who-knows-who. At times I'm just bouncing in my chair digging the music, while at others I'm sorta wagging my hand in the universal gesture of get-on-with-it.

Digging around on the net, I find he studied under Fred Frith, which is as good a pedigree as any. And why don't I have any Fred Frith, for frack's sake (I guess since I have a lot of The Residents I sorta have him, as he guested with them tons)?

Wow, pent-up weblogging fury! I better stop before I kill again. Anyway, I'll tag the other recent albums onto the end of this post when I get home. Ciao!

Updates

• Overnight in Paris - Clifford Brown


• Alice - Tom Waits


• Winter Moon - Art Pepper


• The Black Light - Calexico

And two piano compositions by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou from the 'Ethiopiques Volume 21 - Ethiopia Song'. I plan to grab the rest of this album over time.