Whoaaaaaaeeeerg.....For the lack of a better Title

Greetings All. Now to one thing and another.

In Musical news, just picked up a copy of Purcell's "Ayers for the Theater" (50 tracks in all, damn!) and one of those "Classical-on-a-budget" CDs of Brahms' Requiem. The former because I just performed selections from "The Fairy Queen" on my concert a few days ago, and the latter because I'm resolved to collect and listen to every major classical piece with "Requiem" in the title (Verdi, Mozart, Berlioz, Britten and Brahms down!). So far I haven't been disappointed, except maybe for Britten's "Sinfonia de Requiem," which is rather modern in it's own right (read, somewhat atonal). Anywho, listening to the second movements of Brahms' right now, Wayy cool! Goes right up there with roughly every incarnation of "Dies Irae," Mozart's "Kyrie Elesion/Lux Aeterna," and Verdi's final "Libera Me." This is shake-you-fist-at-the-heavens, primal-yell, angry-Beethoven-type stuff! OHHH YEAHHHH!!!

Also went on a kick of watching the "Sin City" trailer over and over and over and over.....Not only does it look like a kick-ass movie (with some glowing prelim reviews as well), but the trailer music rocks! As usual, there are invariably message boards with whole threads devoted to "What was that one song used in that one movie/trailer?" stuff. Sure enough, one quick look on www.soundtrack.net/trailers showed the name, and a cruz through some message boards found me the original mix of "Cells" by The Servant. Much like Rob D and Matrix Reloaded, I've gotta wait for the album to come out in order to get the instrumental version of the song. Fun stuff.

Used the last of me budgeted money (but still some leftover!) to find again how AVP could have been soooo much better. After watching the 20 min featurette on the Making Of, I found that ol' Paul WS Anderson knew more about the whole AVP comic sensation than I had originally thought. Even so, the movie could have been better with a crapload of dialogue changes and a crapload of acting/plot changes. Here we go....

dialogue Nitpicks: There are some seriously laughable lines here. Lex and crew enter the chamber just below the egg chamber, where Weyland's bodyguard (Maxwell? Can't even remember the names, horrid) had earlier, IN FULL VIEW OF THE OTHER CHARACTERS, dropped a humungo glowstick through the hole of the egg chamber. Sorry for the long setup, but Lex says, after consulting her little GPS and STARING RIGHT AT THE GLOWSTICK, "This must be the room below the Sacrificial Chamber!" NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!

Also, lotta expository information delivered by the characters that fluctuate. One moment, they're sounding like their making educated guesses based on what their seeing, which is fine. The next their delivering info that makes it sound like they know everything. In the Egg Chamber, Sebastian says, after staring at a corpse for all of 5 seconds "The chosen ones would lie here....they would go willingly, their hands and feet unbound." This sounds like he was somehow well versed in the subject of Alien/Human interaction history. C'mon! Show a little discretion! "It would appear that these 'chosen ones' would lie here, willingly. See? They were unbound." Grown up humans making intelligent guesses based on info they have at hand, not Miss Cleo "I'm-a channellin' a lotta dialogue now," crap. Piss off!

And WTF was with that whole touchy-feely-warm scenes between the final Predator and Lex? Dear God! These aliens are Hunters! We don't even know if there ARE Female Predators, or even the capacity for one to go "Whoaaa now, she's kinda cute!" NAW, the Predator should have had gruff respect for this feisty human. Along the lines of "Humph, ya got some skills on ya, Here, arm yourself and see if you can survive!" and "Not bad, not bad....for a human." I read somewhere that it should have been an Arnie-like character (not to disparage Girl-Power) and that final scene on the ridge would be a mix of grudging respect and sizing each other up. Extra-ordinary circumstances brought them together, but that doesn't mean that they should all of the sudden go all warm and cuddly on each other! Yeeesh. At least the big, angry-momma Queen kicked some serious ass (Though it would have been nice to see the Predators kick some more Alien-butt, they died too damn quickly!) ::end AVP rant::

Gettin my Mus. Theory Project done. Finally decided on just playing the MIDI file through Finale as the performance. I had to wrangle with the playback notation/controls, but things are ending up nicely. I just need about a minute and a half more music....oy. Composing is tough stuff!

Gads, need to work on my Humanities paper, I should get at least 500 words done before the weekend (or more) if I hope to not have to lock myself in on Sunday to finish it. Finishing the reading would help too....

Ahh, but some light in the mud of work, Seeing My Lady. Had a nice night last night, just sitting In the Arboretum. I'm not going to be explicit, but you can ask me for details if you want (but whether or not I tell you is another thing entirely!) Lets just say it was quite nice. ::checks off something on his "Romantic To-Do List":: I look forward to seeing her again.

Enough. More Later.
- James