The Rabbit Hole

I keep leaving behind books that I'm really keen on. Weekend before last, I left my biography of The Beatles at a friend's place. This week, I've gone and left The Stand at another friend's apartment.

Pity, that, as The Stand is my inspiration for this first Friday Poll in forever! ( The motivation! )

I'm curious, though, if any of you have similar reading habits. Hence the poll.
[Poll #1524813]

Just some production and preference questions on Shakespeare, nothing too soul-searching. It's not bloody...well, you know.

[Poll #1058967]

Of course, this was inspired by our Wednesday trip to King Lear. In which those fabulous bitches, Goneril and Regan, had coats to kill for (a-ha! the real reason they were such spiteful hags!). Honestly, though, I can't remember a production where I didn't hate them for as long as I did. Sir Ian McKellan's doddering Lear really made them seem almost reasonable. I suspect the reasons for this are two-fold. One, the production did a great job of showing how rowdy and awful Lear's men were (making them seem like awful houseguests to inflict upon anyone). And two, Lear was so obviously already senile by the time he makes the downfall decision of his life, that you can almost imagine that Goneril and Regan had developed their attitudes as survival mechanisms to deal with an increasingly insensate, irrascible father. It speaks well to contemporary audiences of the so-called "sandwich" generations who must not only provide for children but for their own parents when said elders are no longer able to care for themselves. So Lear's ranting about how awful it is to be treated like a child, while meant to be sympathetic to us once upon a tiime, really doesn't win any pity from me. Because tempermental adults are no better than children. And are possibly worse.

Further proof that I am a firm Slytherclaw? I still wish Edmund had won somehow. He was smart, ambitious, talented--more so than the rest of the petty, mock-villainous crowd or the sanctimonious/crazy good folk. He deserves to win for being just that much more clever, you ask me. Edmund is a mini-Iago, someone who for no fault of his own, is just passed by in opportunities that he does not make himself. Iago's more shallow than Edmund, though. Edmund, being a bastard, has had nothing to do with his own base-ness, and he has very probably only turned out so rotten for the fact he's been teased his whole life as being the production of base desire. Ugh. I was never so disgusted as when Glouscester sits and regales a friend about the getting of Edmund. WHILE EDMUND STANDS THERE. Ugh ugh ugh.

And yet? I found I actually liked Edgar, who previously got held aside with the same disgust I show for the useless but oh-so-saintly Cordelia. The actor was phenomenal in expressing his anguish over the fate of his father. He and the actor playing Edmund were fantastic played off each other. So, while I still wish Edmund could have won, Edgar's revenge was very satisfying.

Not my favorite play (I've ranted about how stupid it is that Cordelia didn't just suck it up and kiss-ass too many times to repeat all that here), but it was well done. I was entertained, which was all I asked. And the hanging of the Fool shocked me, which was fun in its way for being different (not fun in the way darkling1 enjoyed that; having only seen Sylvester McCoy in that awful Doctor Who movie, I can't say I hate him for anything...yet). Mostly because they went into the intermission with him still hanging. I'd just begun to wonder if they meant to leave him until the second half when the actors came and got him down. Yeesh.

Last Friday's poll results are pretty much what I expected.

It is hard to generalize about adaptations and updates, and yet? We all recognize the good from the bad when we see it. You know what I mean. You can look at something like Twelfth Night and go, "Okay, so the period costume has changed. It's still not going to be She's the Man." Well, I mean you would if you weren't my sister (let's just not even go there).

But why is that, even? She's the Man stars no worse a cast than, say, Clueless (back when Alicia Silverstone was just the chick from the Aerosmith videos). What makes a modern Shakespeare update so awful but a modern Austen update so palatable? Perhaps it's the problem of language in Shakespeare--without it, his plots seem awful thin, definitely bawdy, and often unpalatable to modern audiences (the production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" that we saw really drove home how hatably unforgiveable Oberon's actions are to me, for instance). With the language, it's harder to move the story into a present time. If it's not comfortably clothed in clearly dated costumes, that language won't fly.

I like how y'all preference the people involved over authorial approval when it comes to adaptations, though. I actually really do. Because there are just always going to be some authors who pick fights and have major hate-ons for anyone who tries to adapt their "genius" (ahem, Alan Moore anyone?); whose works aren't even as good as what was made of them (Michael Crichton, I am looking at you, you global-warming-denying motherfucker); or who are stubborn and refuse to see any good in anything made of their work (I know a lot of shit has been made out of her stuff, but Ursula Leguin seems particularly fussy to me). I agree with you folks: the people doing the legwork on a thing are more important and integral to the success (or failure) of an adaptation than the original author.

Plus, it makes for great fun speculating WTF about certain casting choices, directing choices, settings etc. Like trying to figure out what the fuck Edward Norton is going to do as Bruce Banner. Buh-uh?

Of course, my vanity demands you talk about a subject nearer and dearer to me than y'alls, but have at it anyway.

[Poll #1044566]

I forgot how bad bed head with short-short hair looks. I found out this morning. I also realize that it will never look so good as when I got it cut. I need to pay more attention next time and figure out how the lady cutting it used the round brush to make it curl inwards. It has instead curled outwards, making me look even more like my second Simpsons avatar. Which would be fine if both sides of my head agreed to the one hairstyle. But they won't. Alas.

After our trip to Six Flags, this week's Friday Poll couldn't help but be about amusement parks, could it?

[Poll #1040551]

Incidentally: SIX FLAGS WAS MADE OF AWESOME. We got there only by about 1:30 pm all told, and we still did a hundred rides in that time. Because we bought the Flash Pass (which worked a lot faster than the guy dressed up did). When you get the tickets as 2-for-1, the extra the Flash Pass adds to it only brings it up to what the full-price admission was. Believe me, it's worth it, especially at this park where people are miserable, lines are out in the sun almost always, and it's crowded as nuts even on Tuesday. Basically, it lets you book a time for a ride, come back then and get on, with the delay dependent on the estimated time for getting on people who would be waiting on line would have. So, if it was an hour for Kingda Ka, you still wait an hour, you just don't do so on the line.

Except that, for some reason, our passes totally got us onto everything within about half an hour to forty-five minutes of arriving at the station to book the rides. And there wasn't a one that we went on, not even the unpopular ones, that didn't have a line longer than that when we got there. We're not sure if we magically got upgraded to the Gold Flash Pass, which supposedly cut down on wait times and let you not have to do your waiting on the line. I don't think that could be possible, though. Our wait times between rides (you could book up to twelve and they would just count down after you finished each one) were so short you could barely get to and from the lines themselves to check in. And the Gold Flash Pass was easily twice as expensive as the other...if I get that bill, I crack skulls.

But yeah. I can never go to that park again without the Flash Pass. Because it is so nice not to wait on line and the wait was definitely shorter than experienced by line-dwellers. Really, it's that much nicer not to wait on line alone, and the shorter lines are like some crazy bonus that the cost just never even mattered. Didn't bother me again from the first ride. I highly recommend it.

I also highly recommend that everyone does the Superman: Ultimate Flight ride. It's not just a gimmick to have you on your belly going over a roller coaster. It really adds a lot more thrill to a fairly usual, ordinary roller coaster, and was so much fun. After that, Nitro and El Toro were awesome. Kingda Ka was thrillingly TERRIFYING, but not worth any of the waits you'd face without a Flash Pass, I'll say that. The Batman ride was good, as always, though it made me a little queasy. I will warn everyone I know AGAIN to never, not even if you have a gun to your head, to ride the Great American Scream Machine. The screams are screams of intense pain.. That's why I banged my head hard enough to remain nauseated through yesterday evening. And if you have to ride Medusa, be careful to keep your head back or you'll lose it there too.

Looking at results to the first ever Friday Poll leads me to conclude that I know extraordinarily intelligent people. I think the plan with the Friday Poll will be to let folks vote until Monday and then discuss results and pretend that we are any sort of demographic with any kind of statistical relevance.

Sound good?