Jump in bed and cover up your head

[austin_dern]

There's things I miss about living in a city. I do work in a city right now, although my only interaction is to drive in and out, and to fairly often walk down half a block to get lunch. That doesn't give much room for odd things to happen, although they sometimes will anyway, like the oil dripping from the ceiling. One of the little moments from walking about Manhattan was going past one of the many T-shirt vendors, who was hoping to encourage a person to buy shirts showing off the Statue of Liberty and the like. At the point my mother and I walked past, he said, ``Now this one is not the Canal Street special.'' We took another couple steps and then looked at each other and shrugged about how such a thing could be said.

Wholly unrelated: I ran across a review of The Nutcracker, a ballet which I've never seen I suppose because my parents evaluated holiday traditions on a case-by-case basis before including them in our lives. I have seen it parodied often, since it's almost as hard to dodge as It's A Wonderful Life parodies are, and some of those are great. I'm thinking particularly of SCTV's sketch ``Neil Simon's The Nutcracker Suite'' starring `Judd Hirsch', `Richard Dreyfus', and `Alan Alda'. I don't know what it does for Tchaikovsky, but I like what it does for Simon, Hirsch, Dreyfus, and Alda.

What I didn't know was a casual mention that the ballet was based on a story by ETA Hoffmann. Him I know, as I've read a smattering of the prototypes to science fiction from the 18th and 19th century and his name (Ernst Theodor Wilhelm) crops up there reliably. I had no idea; more, I'd never stopped to wonder where the story came from. That it came from a name I would recognize I really wouldn't have guessed.

Wikipedia incidentally notes that Hoffmann was ``a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman, and caricaturist.'' I wouldn't have guessed the caricaturist part either. I'm always amazed by the things I never stopped to wonder.

Trivia: Thomas Hutchins and Andrew Ellicot's marker denoting the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, set in 1785, was only 23 feet west of the intended location. Source: The Fabric of America, Andro Linklater.

Currently Reading: The Age of Voltaire, Will and Ariel Durant.

(Oh, and look at that: 40 years ago today Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt was officially declared dead. He'd just kind of gone missing during a swim two days earlier. According to Wikipedia, the Coroner ruled he drowned in accidental circumstances. The Coroner ruled this on 2 September 2005. Interesting country.)

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

the ballet was based on a story by ETA Hoffmann.

Curiously, I was familiar with 'The Nutcracker' long before I was aware of Hoffman. The ballet is only indirectly based on Hoffman - it's actually based on a 'nice' adaptation of the story by Dumas the Elder. The Hoffman version is much darker.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, now, I didn't know it went farther back still, although I am aware a lot of these stories stretch back into an indeterminate past.

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

If you do decide to ever see the Nutcracker (not that you're missing out on much) keep an eye out for a modernized version of it that crops up now and again, "The Cracked Nut". PBS aired a performance of it about 15 years ago (I think it might of been under the "Great Performances" banner) which was at least much more fun to look at then the conventional version, mostly because many of the dancing parts with strictly predefined gender expectations, such as the "sugar plum fairies", were done by men in drag. There's nothing like a bunch of guys in purple tutus to make Christmas more jolly. ;^)

I still find myself scrubbing through TV listings around Christmas (to no avail) hoping they'll dig it out of the vault. (Assuming it still exists. Part of me suspects all the tapes were burned in response to the death threats that undoubtedly poured in after the original airing.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You know, I was this close to having Google Video search for the title, and then I realized what under no circumstances did I want to see whatever came up from that search query. You're on your own there.

Oddly given the stuff I do watch I never got into PBS once I outgrew The Electric Company. From the stuff I know airs there I should like it, but I don't actually watch. No idea why.

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I already tried the search, and all it netted was a video of a squirrel. ;^) Even a general web search doesn't net many hits. Mostly it's references to local/college performance groups putting it on. My guess is that the adaptation was simply too clever for its own good and thus sunk into obscurity.

PBS was nearly all I watched for over a decade, after having this moment of clarity and insight (At a suprisingly young age, and during a "Mr. Belvedere" episode, of all things.) about the true nature of network television. I came to appreciate the fact that although PBS shows can be dry, pretentious, amateurish, or irrelevant, sometimes more then one of those things at once, they're rarely *stupid*, and no commercials is a big bonus. Over that same decade the show-to-commercial ratio on broadcast TV went from something like 85/15% to 75/25%, so I picked a good time to bail. (Admittedly 75/25 is looking pretty good compared to the current 67/33%-ish ratio.) If what's on TV is of marginal quality and interest it might as well be simply boring rather then actively annoying.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You can claim to have found anything you want, I'm not putting that in a search engine. Who knows when the record of an action like that might fall into the hands of a potential employer?

I realized while young -- specifically, during an episode of Three's Company -- that I was smarter than at least some of the people on television, but somehow that didn't turn into a PBS habit for me. I really don't know why. It'd be easy to blame it all on Cartoon Network from the years when it had the Spear of Destiny and couldn't help making a house ad that was brilliant and impossible not to rewatch hundreds of times, but that does leave most of the 80s unaccounted for. And for 2001-2006 I didn't habitually watch Arts Central in Singapore that approximates the grown-up PBS content, albeit with slender commercial breaks.

(You remember Kids Central, the afternoon version of the channel, from its TV Mobile incarnation on the bus. The strange children's show with Einstein.)

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I find myself watching a reasonable amount of PBS shows, due to BBC imports like Monty Python's Flying Circus, Are You Being Served? and Chef; as well as America's Test Kitchen. This is more of a factor of being on $13-monthly cable, and not having Cartoon Network, TLC, Animal Planet, Sci-Fi, etc.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't know what I'd watch if I didn't have the satellite TV. Probably more DVDs, though; I doubt I have quite enough to run my own station, but give me a little effort and I probably could.

(Actually, with my father watching stuff till 9 or 10 pm, those nights when I have extruded office product in the morning I'd have all my own watching occupied just with The Price is Right and Late Night with Conan O'Brien.)