a rainy sunday

It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring.


Well, he was.


Have you met my dad? He's loud when he does everything - talk, eat, walk, sleep, burp, fart. He's the King of Noise, if you know what I mean. How else did I wake up if it wasn't to his booming voice? Anyway, it's 12:38 pm right now, and my sister and I just came back from dim sum with the family.


I am officially on spring break now and am currently in Los Angeles, back with my family. I came via Southwest and finished Maus I on the plane ride over:

Maus is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, and it's about his family's experience during and after Hitler's reign. I haven't read many graphic novels, to be honest, but I really liked this one. It was moving, and the pictures just go so well with the captions.

We're reading Maus I and II for my Scandinavian class, which is centered around the relationship between words and images. So to save money, I went to Shakespeare & Co. (a local bookstore in Berkeley) and bought used versions of both for about $7-8. Definitely no regrets. It's really interesting, actually, because the Jewish people in this novel are represented as mice (hence Maus) and the Germans are cats. But because Spiegelman uses animals to differentiate by race, there are no distinct features of specific characters themselves. Thus, you would have to read the words in order to understand which person is which because the pictures don't say enough. And going hand in hand with that, you would get the gist from reading the words but you won't understand what's going on if you ignored the pictures.

I'm a newb at graphic novels, so excuse all the obvious things I'm saying. I am just amazed by how much can be implied by both words and images, but how to get the whole picture you would have to marry the two and see them working together. Maybe I'm just getting really involved in the subject of my class.

Anyway, I enjoyed the novel. It ended in a cliffhanger, so we'll just have to see what happens in Maus II (which I have not read yet, obviously). As a final conclusion, the pictures were very well-drawn, the characters identifiable if you are American and your parents were immigrants, and the story captivating and moving. You really gain a sense of what Spiegelman is trying to do as you get deeper and deeper into the novel. There's also a bit of comedy amidst the drama and sadness. Talk about dimensional.

Anyway, it's a buy. So do it!

when classic goes modern

We've finally gotten to Mozart's Don Giovanni in music class this week, and the professor's been showing clips of the songs from different productions. It's interesting to see the different interpretations out there and how each actor embodies his or her role differently. I really like watching each production's take on the opera because the characters may look or dress differently, and though they're singing the same songs they may add their own personal twist as well.


But what happens when this idea of 'updating the old' enters Mozart's sphere? Yesterday the professor showed one production where Don Giovanni was set up in the present day, and honestly the costumes and props made me feel like I was watching a bad '80s movie. Don Giovanni was in a leather jacket and Donna Elvira had bright red lipstick and pink leopard-printed tights. In the party scene, Don Giovanni stripped down to wear only his boxers and was doing some odd dance with Zerlina, who as a peasant was wearing dowdy clothes that looked like they were taken from the thrift store.


Entertaining? Yes. Preferable? NO!