I'm a little over halfway through correcting the final exams of my only course this semester (yeah, yeah, I know, it's May Day, I shouldn't be working - grades were due yesterday and I procrastinated; so shoot me), and I've hit that point where I'm going "Nobody understood anything I told them! Either that or they didn't understand the test questions! I'm a bad teacher OMG!" Remind me again why I keep doing this?

...and still totally pumped. I've been joking for weeks that all the other Marvel features in this 'verse were just extended trailers for this one, which proved to be not far from wrong. Joss Whedon pulls off a fully realized adventure drama with - finally! - an actual story arc and character development, IMO (well, for a certain Marvelesque definition of character development). It didn't seem anything like 2h20m-plus - the pacing is pretty near perfect. Maybe I'll post more later after it's had time to percolate into my consciousness a bit further (and after the US opening, when spoilers won't be such a danger), but for now: definitely 2 thumbs up.

Damn, LiveJournal is awfully slow today. I fear it may have something to do with the coming elections.

Guess I'd better suck it up and change my hated dorky Dreamwidth name to match my LJ one and start friending friends there...

My older cat, not quite 12, who'd been treated for kidney disease for almost 4 years, made his last trip to the vet yesterday. He was a sweetie.

The thing all great art really needs is this.

It's been almost exactly a year since I last took it into my head to change my journal titles, design, etc. The last line of Saki's "The Open Window" has been running through my head lately, so that was the inspiration and is my new friends page title. To discover what the journal subtitle means, you'll have to read the story, one of Saki's most famous.

PS: while looking for a link to the story, I ran across this lovely query in the Spanish forums at WordReference.com:

'I'd like to know if "romance at short notice was her speciality" means the same as "love at first sight".'

Sweet.

Hi and Happy New Year to all my LJ friends. I'm at LaGuardia airport waiting for a flight to Washington, and thence home to Paris, after about 5 days each in Colorado Springs (with my dad), Fort Worth (with my mom) and New York (with friends). I seem to have acquired an extra bag - a tote bag my mom gave me, which is full of books and clothes. My suitcase is full of ditto, only rather more books than clothes, or so it seemed when I was packing this morning. I had a grand time in NYC, but it's not a very relaxing city. Looking forward to getting back to the more leisurely pace of Paris.

Let's see, what all did we do? Monday night was Japanese food in Park Slope, our Brooklyn neighborhood. Tuesday my friend Martine and I explored SoHo and the Village, then took shelter from a pouring rainstorm with American friends in the West Village before late-night shopping at the famous Strand bookstore. Lunch and dinner were both Italian. Wednesday started on the High Line, a disused elevated train line that has become a park. And I bought running shoes on sale, but my quest for other new shoes was fruitless -  a first for me in NY, where on previous trips I have always been able to find my very hard-to-find size. It was also a museum day: the Frick collection, which, rather like the Courtauld Gallery in London, is one famous masterpiece after another till you want to cry with it. Lunch was bagel sandwiches at a midtown deli, and for dinner I had posh Chinese food in Midtown with elrhiarhodan, an LJ friend I was meeting for the first time. She was fun and interesting, and gave me a ride home on her way back to Queens Long Island, which allowed us to get lost all over Brooklyn thanks to the fact that there are about 3 different 12th streets in the borough and her GPS (and I) mixed them up. Meanwhile, Martine's friends Frédérique and Sylvain got in that night.

The next morning I stayed in to get caught up on this and that while the others explored an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood further north in Brooklyn. We met in a Polish neighborhood nearby for lunch, which was sandwiches again - NY restaurants do great sandwiches. Then we went to Chinatown to pick up another friend, Cristina, who took one of those cheap Chinese immigrant buses down from Boston. Afterward Martine and I went to the Met to see La Fille du Régiment. It was a lovely production by Laurent Pelly and all his usual team, but we were disappointed with the acoustics. We were in the middle of the second (and last) balcony, and the music was much less present than it is from even the very last row of the Opéra Bastille. I suppose the fact that the Met seats 3,800 (against the Bastille's 2,700) could have something to do with that.

Um, I'm starting to get confused now about when we did what. I think Friday was when we went to the upper West Side. We took an express subway almost all the way to the very northern tip of Manhattan, home of The Cloisters, where the Metropolitan Museum keeps its medieval art. I'd been before, many many years ago, and back then I thought it was cool that all these bits and pieces of architecture and art had been brought over from France, Spain, Germany, etc. This time it seemed more heartbreaking than cool; comparing notes later, we found we'd all just mostly stopped looking at the provenance signs after a while and tried to simply appreciate the fact that the stuff was here and in an admittedly magnificent setting overlooking the Hudson River. And who knows, if it hadn't been brought here it might in many cases have been lost entirely, so.

After The Cloisters we took a bus to Morningside Heights, ate lunch at a bistro and dessert at a Hungarian pastry shop, then explored in and around the cathedral of St John the Divine. The French people wanted to see Harlem but as a couple of them have trouble walking, we waited for a bus and by the time we got there it was too dark to see much. Maybe next time. Dinner that night was finger food and soup from Union Market, a foodie paradise in Park Slope.

Yesterday I again took the morning off to do online chores. I may not have been to NY in a long time, but I've been often enough that I didn't feel like I needed to go go go all the time. Frédérique and I did explore a bit in Park Slope, and then we went to Midtown Manhattan to meet the others. Sylvain and Fréddie had New Year's Eve plans in New Jersey but the rest of us wanted to hear a free concert ("of spirituals," we'd been told) at the cathedral. At the last minute, though, fearing NYE crowds, I decided to go home instead. The concert turned out to be A Child of Our Time, and I'm sure it was lovely but since I have tickets to see it in March in London, I'm just as happy to have had some alone time instead.

And that's it, my week in New York. It was much too short. Must keep an eye out for deals on flights, and maybe see about staying at Jane & David's next time. Oh, I was bitten by something, on my right arm and left ear, which both swelled up. Not bedbugs, I think - the bite pattern and type of swelling was different. Spider? Flea? Something in the subway? Who knows. I got an antihistamine and some cortisone cream, and voilà, problem more or less solved.

Thanks to the magic of differing time zones, I'm only a couple of hours (instead of a whole day) late in wishing Happy Birthday to one of my oldest LJ friends, Thaddeusfavour. Hope it was a great one, m'dear.

On Saturday, after lunch at the Turkish restaurant Haz near St Paul's, we visited a photo exhibition at the Museum of London - street photography from the very earliest days of cameras that could actually be taken easily into the streets. Also, the medieval galleries, which were closed last time we were at the museum. Then it was on to the Barbican for drinks before South Pacific, the recent Broadway production by Bartlett Sher, but with a mostly British cast. Nellie's accent sounded more Cockney than Arkansas much of the time and there was zero chemistry between her and Emile. The production itself, however, was very effective and of course the music is some of the finest Rodgers and Hammerstein ever did. Welsh baritone Jason Howard's rendition of "This Nearly Was Mine" nearly stopped the show.

Two more Proms on Sunday - French organ music and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. The latter only confirmed me in my feeling that Beethoven couldn't really write for the voice. Listening to the sopranos made my throat hurt. Monday was an easy day -  a little work, a little French-influenced modern British cuisine with a friend in the evening in Great Queen Street (which was also the name of the restaurant), near High Holborn, where I was staying in one of the London School of Economics residence halls.

Tuesday we were off to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, north of London. I took the train up, and my friend met me in his Porsche 911 GT3 - an impressive ride but not very comfortable for someone of my size. We spent the day taking a tour and seeing the many exhibitions at Bletchley Park, where Britain's WWII codebreakers and cryptoanalysts worked - most famously Alan Turing. It was all fascinating. One relatively new exhibition was devoted to the women of Bletchley Park, who made up some 80% of the staff. it's amazing to think that, for 30 years after the war ended, the role of this place remained a secret - and that in the 1990s the whole estate came close to being handed over to developers.

I came back to Paris yesterday evening, but not before spending a few hours at the British Museum's gorgeous exhibition of reliquaries, "Treasures of Heaven." I've seen a lot of this kind of work in cathedral treasuries around Europe, but the exhibition offered a chance to get right up close to some of the objects and examine the incredibly beautiful detail work in enamel, niello and other decorative techniques.

I’ve spent the last several days having a little vacation and adventures, of a mild sort, which I thought I’d post about as it’s been quite a while. This was my last of three visits to London for the annual Proms summer music festival, but I bracketed the concert days with free time, which work encroached on only a bit. It started on Thursday night, when I took the bus to Chelsea for dinner with friends at Choy’s Chinese restaurant in the King’s Road.
The next day was the busiest of the trip, starting with pre-theatre lunch in the Swan brasserie at Shakespeare’s Globe. Our play was Much Ado About Nothing, one of my favorites. Eve Best and Charles Edwards were our Beatrice and Benedick, and they were quite adorable. (Coincidentally, she played Wallis Simpson in The King’s Speech and he played David, the future Duke of Windsor, in a TV movie several years earlier about George VI and the Queen Mum.) I’d have loved to see the West End production with Catherine Tate and David Tennant as well, but my companion in culture consumption wouldn’t have stood for it – besides which, our choice was the better reviewed and we’d been promising ourselves a first visit to the Globe forever. We had seats in the top gallery, but as the theatre is really pretty small, we felt reasonably close to the action on stage. It was especially fun to watch the actors interacting with the groundlings (one of whom fainted from the sun and had to be carried out).
It was straight from there to the Royal Albert Hall for the first of two wonderful Proms with Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. They gave rip-roaring accounts of Mahler’s First and, earlier in the program, Lizst’s Totentanz (among other first-half numbers), featuring a super young Croatian pianist, Dejan Lazić, who played like a man possessed indeed, and as an encore gave us Giovanni Dettori’s fugue on the theme of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”! But the highlight of the night was their second concert, billed as “Audience Choice.” As we entered, we were each handed a program and a raffle ticket. The program listed nearly 300 works or movements, numbered. Everyone was to pick the one they wanted to hear, then the tuba player went round with his instrument full of numbers matching those on the tickets, and three people whose numbers were picked named their chosen works. The audience voted among the three, by acclamation, then the 2d violinist who served as the orchestra's music librarian hurried off to fetch the scores, while other members of the band kept the crowd amused with variety acts ranging from a bit of Telemann quartet to 4 percussionists doing body beats. Fischer and all the orchestra were in casual clothes, the mood ranged from relaxed to uproarious, and the orchestra played everything quite brilliantly, even though Fischer had warned that we might be picking numbers they hadn't run through in a while. All the works were new to me, in fact. Great stuff!