Disaster Area

Pacific Northwest Ballet - Giselle opens tonight

Preview from PNB featuring Carla Körbes

The New New Beetle or the Old Old Fusion Beetle?

Interesting to see VW's direction with the new new Beetle. The last one has been around a while and hs survived on quirky charm and a lot of female buyers. It vied with the new Mini for least amount of usable interior space, so it's really no wonder it's been more of an image car than a practical one.

People are saying the new, less curvy style is aimed more at men, which may well be true, but it sure seems to me that VW has gone for a retro fusion look between the Beetle and the Karmann Ghia.

Plus

Equals ?

Flying Cars - Sigh...

 

Well, take your pick:

Be aware they all fall prey to one or more of a few fatal flaws:

• Made of Unobtainium
• Violate laws of physics
• Suck as both a car and a plane

Ballet - Director's Choice at Pacific Northwest Ballet

With all the excitement of fall comes a new ballet season. As I've been checking popular posts from the past on the blog one that has been popular via search engines for three years is the Twyla Tharp In The Upper Room ballet post from Nov 2007. That was a remarkable piece, made brilliant by a combination of music, choreography and costume. I would love to see it come back (and many pieces much less worthy have been repeated in less time) but sadly it hasn't happened yet.

However, the new season opens tonight with Director's Choice. There are four pieces, one of them is  Glasspieces, with music by Philip Glass and choreography by Jerome Robbins. The music for the two pieces (Rubric and Facades) is very reminiscent of the score for In The Upper Room (adapted for that ballet I suppose) so at least one of the elements for this program will be similar. With his broadway background, Robbins' take on the Glass music will be interesting. Here's a look behind the scenes in rehearsal, courtesy of the Pacific Northwest ballet's youtube channel:

Two of the other pieces have been done very recently by PNB - Petite Mort and Jardi Tancat, while Six Dances is a PNB premiere.

In any season there are some classic ballets that are good, but well understood and predictable. The Director's Choice programs are where artistic director Peter Boal will take a few more risks. Not everything pays off, but when something does it's usually spectacular - like In The Upper Room. Wel worth the risk of checkng out the program this weekend and next.

The Girl With...

I may be the last person on earth to be reading the Stieg Larsson Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, but they have been well worth the wait. Absorbing and intriguing and not exactly G rated. It's also odd to think that Larsson wrote the books and delivered them en bloc just before he died.

It's also been fun to adapt to reading novels on the iPad. In fact, with Kindle syncing between laptop, desktop, iPad and iPhone it's been a very high tech reading experience. And speaking of technology, Larsson inserts huge lists of the tech items that Lisbeth Salander uses in the books. I guess at the time it must have been cool (so much apple gear!), but seven or eight years on it all seems terribly outdated. Then again, I guess the iPad will be an amusing relic in about five years too.

Meanwhile, off to San Francisco for the weekend and looking forward to Hawaii at the end of October.

Modern Art

Two interesting pieces of art with a non-traditional twist. First, David Kassan's live streamed three hour finger painting portrait on the iPad:

And then an aeronautical theme - Fiona Banner takes a retired Jaguar and Sea Harrier and does something interesting with them at the Tate Britain.