2011 in Books

I feel like I read less in 2011 than in other years. I certainly wrote fewer blog posts about books. And I've owned a copy of Sondheim's Look I Made a Hat for six weeks now but still haven't finished it, which is why it's not on this list. Oh, and I seem to have read only books by white men during the latter part of 2011.

Enough guilt and self-flagellation. Moving on. I tried a new way of counting books this year, with one list for "Longer Works" (primarily novels and nonfiction) and a separate list for individual plays. I averaged 2 Longer Works and 2 plays per month -- 23 Longer Works and 28 plays total. Please also note that I counted only plays that have been published and that you could purchase and read for yourself if you wished. I read several new/unpublished plays this year (either written by my playwriting friends, or submitted to a playwriting contest that I was helping to judge), but it's not fair to list them on my blog.

LONGER WORKS: 

1. Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith. Highly recommended. 

2. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, by Lydia Davis. Or should I count this as four books, as it is four volumes of short stories now being compiled into one? Seven hundred pages of minimalist short fiction is a lot, despite the critical acclaim, and perhaps one would be better served reading it as four separate volumes.

3. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill. I don't feel like getting involved in the literary-aesthetic battle that Zadie Smith started after writing a critical piece on this novel, so is it OK just to say that I generally enjoyed this book but also am not hailing it as the second coming?

4. Prague, by Arthur Phillips (2nd read). I read this book when I was in high school, due to the good reviews and my fascination with Eastern European history, but I enjoy it even more now, when I, like the characters, am a confused twenty-something. It is written with verve, has a lot of memorable set-piece passages, and inspired a game of Sincerity between me and some friends in a bar one night. Oh, and I just found a review that calls Prague "the literary equivalent of a Whit Stillman movie" -- so, naturally, I love it. Highly recommended.

5. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte (3rd read). Highly recommended. 

6. Just Kids, by Patti Smith. While I probably would not have gone so far as to award this the National Book Award, I enjoyed it. Recommended.

7. The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian. Recommended. 

8. The Egyptologist, by Arthur Phillips. This is how I like my "light" reading to be: cleverly constructed, laugh-out-loud funny, full of unreliable narrators, and with an unexpected emotional kick at the end. Recommended.

9. The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Recommended.

10. The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, by George Howe Colt. Recommended.

11. Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France, by Lucy Moore. This was a good read. I had never read a detailed history of the French Revolution and Moore provides a clear explanation of all of its major events: the storming of the Bastille, the Terror, and beyond. At the same time, her decision to view the Revolution from the perspective of six women from various social classes made it interesting for a feminist like me. Recommended.

12. Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor, by Tad Friend. More research into the lives and times of the American upper-crust! Not as good as The Big House, because it's less focused and written less lyrically. You can probably give this one a pass.

13. Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong (3rd read). This was one of my guilty-pleasure reads in high school and because I was writing a play set in the 1970s, that was enough of an excuse to reread it. While very dated in some ways, it still feels radical in the way that it portrays a woman who is highly sexual and enjoys intellectual pursuits and maintains a wry sense of humor about the absurdities of life. When I was a teenager, Fear of Flying reassured me that women who crack jokes about Chaucer and Sylvia Plath can still be sexy and get laid. And because of that, it was invaluable.

14. The Female Eunuch, by Germaine Greer. Read as part of my Pleiades research, and only valuable as a historical curiosity -- I don't remember much about it now.

15. Machine of Death, by Various. I attended the "Machine of Death"-themed performance by the Un-Scripted Theater Company in July and got a signed copy of the bestselling anthology of stories about what might happen if a machine was invented that could tell you how you are going to die. (I also received my own Machine of Death prediction: "Under Collapsing Shelf." Considering that I live in an earthquake zone and have too many books, this is depressingly likely.) The anthology was a decent read, but I'd had enough of it by the end (I won't be buying Machine of Death II) and the stories haven't really stayed with me.

16. Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays, by David Ball (re-read). There comes a moment, when I'm writing a full-length play, that I have to spend an evening and re-read this little book. Recommended for all theater-makers -- it is brief but full of wisdom.

17. Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, by John Crowley. I quite enjoyed this novel -- no surprise, as it is in the vein of Arcadia and Possession and I'm a huge fan of both those works. The frame story about the modern-day researchers is a bit predictable, but the pastiche of Byron's writing style is deftly done and very amusing. Recommended.

18. An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke. This comic novel got great reviews but I didn't find it funny or interesting at all. Not recommended.

19. The Extra Man, by Jonathan Ames. Mixed feelings: I get what Ames was trying to do, in updating the "New York bildungsroman" to fit our seedy and sexually confused times, and smuggling uncomfortable moments into a book that initially seems like it will be innocuous. But the result is episodic and didn't make me laugh. Or maybe I'm just annoyed that Ames invents a major character who is a failed playwright (Henry Harrison, the protagonist's eccentric roommate) but then has nothing interesting to say about the theater.

20. The Basic Eight, by Daniel Handler. Mixed feelings: this book was advertised as in the vein of The Secret History and Special Topics in Calamity Physics but I enjoyed it the least out of the three. The writing was flat in parts (there's a party scene that drags on way too long) and I wish the San Francisco setting had been better evoked.

21. The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas père, translated by Richard Pevear. Fun! Recommended.

22. Papers for the Suppression of Reality, by Matt Werner. In one of those "only in San Francisco" moments, a few months ago I met one of the guys who was responsible for the Borges Google Doodle, and he gave me a copy of his self-published chapbook of Borges-inspired short fiction. The book is filled out with lots of McSweeney's-inspired literary high jinks. Geeky good fun, and inspired me to go back and reread some of the Borges stories referenced.

23. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, by Mark Harris. Recommended. Harris writes with wit and insight about the demise of the studio system and Production Code, the beginnings of "New Hollywood," and the effects of the upheavals of the 1960s on moviemaking (for instance, several passages deal with Sidney Poitier's sensitive position as the only famous black actor in America). The book also offers valuable insights to anyone involved in a creative field, as we see just how much hard work is required and how many setbacks may occur before the work of art is completed. Even talented artists don't always get to make the movies they wish to make.

PLAYS: 

1. Mirrors in Every Corner, by Chinaka Hodge. I loved this play when I saw it at Intersection for the Arts and was happy that Theatre Bay Area published it in their magazine. 

2. Playboy of the Western World, by J. M. Synge. Related blog post here, about reading it aloud with theater friends. It is hilarious!

3. The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, by Stephen Adly Guirguis. I enjoyed reading this but it felt like quite a long play -- perhaps too long to be staged effectively.

4. Congresswomen, by Aristophanes. Read in preparation for acting in Theater Pub's staged reading of this play in April 2011. We rocked the house in our togas and the audience had a great time laughing at jokes that are over 2000 years old.

5. Swanwhite, by August Strindberg. This lesser-known Strindberg play, with him in a gentle, symbolist, fairy-tale mode (probably influenced by Maeterlinck) was another play that we read aloud at the No Nude Men Salon.

6. Acharnians, by Aristophanes. I decided to work my way through my "Complete Plays of Aristophanes" volume and got about halfway through before determining that I had reached Aristophanes overload. I was reading the Paul Roche translations, and, while modern, they are kind of difficult to read. Roche has striven to reproduce the rhythms of Aristophanes' Greek and often needs to use odd vocabulary words in order to fit the rhythm. Thus, I feel like some punch-lines probably fall flat.

7. Knights, by Aristophanes 

8. Clouds, by Aristophanes 

9. Wasps, by Aristophanes 

10. Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov (re-read). Another play read out loud with theater friends. I played Irina and gave an unexpectedly impassioned rendition of her Act III monologue where she laments being "almost twenty-four, I've been working all this time, and my brain has shriveled up... time passes and you realize you'll never have the beautiful life you dreamed of." I quickly understood that it was a bad sign that I identified so deeply with Irina, and resolved to try to turn my life around. Oh Chekhov, you are the best.

11. Uncommon Women and Others, by Wendy Wasserstein (re-read). Wasserstein blog post here.

12. Isn't It Romantic, by Wendy Wasserstein (re-read) 

13. The Heidi Chronicles, by Wendy Wasserstein (re-read) 

14. Gruesome Playground Injuries, by Rajiv Joseph 

15. The Habit of Art, by Alan Bennett. I read this because I love W.H. Auden (a character in this play) and really enjoyed Bennett's The History Boys, but I'm not sure that the framing backstage-drama elements are that interesting or enjoyable. It all comes off as rather self-congratulatory ("Isn't the National Theatre great? We produce literate plays!"). Then again, The History Boys does not read very well as a script, but it works in performance.

16. Oedipus el Rey, by Luis Alfaro. Another excellent play that premiered in San Francisco in 2010 and was published by Theatre Bay Area. It won the Glickman Award -- this spring I volunteered to help out at the award ceremony. 

17. The Sisters Rosensweig, by Wendy Wasserstein 

18. A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams (re-read). This is one of those plays that haunts my memory and, because I wrote a parody of it earlier this year, I had to reread it.

19. 5th of July, by Lanford Wilson (re-read). While revising Pleiades to take place over Fourth of July weekend, 1971, I had to reread 5th of July -- which takes place over Fourth of July weekend, 1977! 

20. Over Martinis, Driving Somewhere, by Romulus Linney. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but while this was clearly a very personal play for Linney, I found it almost too personal to be really compelling.

21. True West, by Sam Shepard. This is such an archetypal play about brotherhood and masculinity that, after reading it, I'm amazed that I ever saw it in a gender-reversed version (oh, Vassar College student theater...)

22. Buried Child, by Sam Shepard 

23. Curse of the Starving Class, by Sam Shepard. Related blog post here. I think I enjoyed this one even more than Buried Child, though it seems to be less well regarded by critics.

24. Tongues, by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin 

25. Ring Round the Moon, by Jean Anouilh, translated by Christopher Fry. Related blog post here.

26. The Tooth of Crime, by Sam Shepard. What a strange play. The person who wrote the introduction to my book of Shepard plays considers this his masterpiece, but the 1970s rock-and-roll attitudes seem very dated, almost to the point of parody. I also feel like the second act (the duel between Hoss and Crow) is where the real meat of the play is, so much that the first act might be unnecessary. Could this work in the 21st century?

27. La Turista, by Sam Shepard

28. Savage/Love, by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin. With that, I finished Shepard's Seven Plays. I should note that I took a playwriting master class this fall and the teacher made a remark about "that Sam Shepard collection that we all have on our bookshelves" -- I knew just which one he meant!

Previous years' reading lists: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007

What I Liked and What I Didn't about Martin Scorsese's "Hugo"

THINGS I LIKED

• The opening shot took my breath away and the first scene is the best example of over-the-top cinematic Francophilia since Moulin Rouge. I wasn't even paying attention to the plot or characters at first -- I was just luxuriating in the art direction and the 1930s atmosphere. That train station! That café!

• As far as I could tell, every bit of printed text in the movie (signs, books, posters) was in French. Amazing attention to detail and I appreciate that they resisted the temptation to make things easier for an English-speaking audience.

• Two of my favorite time periods, in terms of art and aesthetics (and I think this is true for a lot of people) are the Art Nouveau fin-de-siècle and the Art Deco 1920s-30s. Hugo has a plot that accommodates both periods, and is set in Paris, the epicenter of both of these movements, to boot.

• Hugo is the second 3-D movie I've ever seen (Avatar was the first) and IMO it used the medium very, very well. By the end of Avatar, I was kind of over the 3-D, but Hugo kept surprising me with innovative ways of employing it. At the same time, it knew when to hold back and revert to a flatter picture plane, e.g. for the more intimate scenes in Papa Georges' house.

• Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths as two late-middle-aged folks striking up a tentative romance in the train station. This plot has no purpose other than to be charming and delightful, and it delivers. It's even more charming if you saw and admired these talented character actors in The History Boys -- I was so happy to see them working together again.

• My friend Stuart saw Hugo last week and posted on Facebook that it made him "think a lot about Marissa Skudlarek as there is essentially a character who is her (tall, big vocabulary, wears a beret)."  Ha!  He was referring to Isabelle (played by Chloë Grace Moretz), a young girl who befriends Hugo. She's a type of character we've seen in other movies -- spunky, bookish, romantic, precocious. In the scene in the bookshop she reminded me so much of Disney's Belle.  And when Hugo asks Isabelle why she's helping him, I could predict Isabelle's response before she said it: "Because this is an adventure!"  So she's not the most original character, but she's an archetype that I enjoy. And even if she is a 13-year-old girl, she's one of Scorsese's few female characters that it's OK to be compared with. I may have just found my Halloween costume for next year (and if I do dress up as Isabelle, I will carry the vintage 1930s edition of Les Miserables that Stuart gave me for Christmas).

• Early on, I was convinced that I caught a glimpse of someone costumed and made up to look like James Joyce. Sure enough, "James Joyce" is listed in the credits. So is "Salvador Dalí" but I guess I missed him. (It could not have been as memorable as Adrien Brody's portrayal of Dalí in Midnight in Paris!)

• I also enjoyed playing "spot the cinema reference" throughout the movie. E.g., I'm pretty sure that an allusion to Vertigo was intended during the final scene with Hugo in the clock tower.  Making Hugo the second 2011 film that owes a debt to Vertigo, after The Artist swiped Bernard Herrmann's music for the climactic sequence.

• Another similarity to The Artist: the fake-out dream sequence in Hugo is very well done.

• Innuendo that would only be mildly amusing in an adult movie is somehow made funnier by being in a kids' movie, where you know it will go over the heads of the children in the audience.

• Throughout the whole movie, I was convinced that Olivia Williams was playing Mama Jeanne, Georges' wife. Turns out that the role is played by Helen McCrory, an actress I was not familiar with before. She gives a lovely performance.

• I had a teenage crush on Jude Law and he is still an incredibly good-looking man. (He appears in a flashback as Hugo's father.)  Hey, this movie is all about cinephilia, and one reason we love the movies is that they let us stare into the faces of beautiful people whom we would never have met otherwise.

THINGS I WAS LESS KEEN ON

• I'm not sure it was a good idea to have the character of the Station Inspector, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, function both as the movie's principal villain (chasing Hugo through the station and threatening to send him to an orphanage) and as its principal comic relief (in his amusingly awkward flirtation with a pretty florist played by Emily Mortimer). While I appreciate the desire to depict the Inspector as a real person with some complexity and some heart, as opposed to an incarnation of evil, we can't take the Inspector seriously as a threat to Hugo if he is also a harmless buffoon.

• The first part of the movie hinges on an Idiot Plot. When Papa Georges discovers Hugo's notebook, accuses him of stealing it, and demands to know who drew the pictures in the notebook, why does Hugo remain silent instead of saying "My father did those sketches"? I know that Hugo is a cautious, scared little boy who is still mourning his father, but he never promised to keep the notebook secret, and would it have hurt anyone if he admitted that it was his father's?

• Much is made of how Hugo likes to "fix things" and how his repairing the broken automaton parallels his healing the broken and depressed Papa Georges. Yet I never got a sense that Hugo genuinely loves fixing things and playing with clockwork and gizmos. He repairs the automaton because it is his last connection to his dead father, he fixes the train station clocks because he sees it as his duty... but I never felt that he took sheer delight in mechanical things for their own sake. The character of Isabelle is on hand to supply plenty of wide-eyed wonder, but I could have used some of that from Hugo as well.

• When Hugo uses the word "panache," the script missed an opportunity for Isabelle to respond "Panache! Just like Cyrano de Bergerac!"  I may have been the only person in the theater who would have appreciated this joke, but I would have loved it SO MUCH.

• The little boy next to me was very bored by the movie and began sucking noisily on the dregs of his soda until I had to tell him to knock it off. In fairness, his parents shouldn't have taken him to the 8:30 show and they shouldn't have bought him the industrial-size Coca-Cola. Nonetheless, if this is a "family film," it should not bore children. Even I thought that the movie moved too slowly in parts and contained a few too many scenes of Hugo being chased through the train station and Hugo fiddling with clockwork.

• Now is the time to mention that the international terminal at the San Francisco airport currently has an exhibit of vintage French automata on display (was it timed to the release of this movie?) and if you're there you should check it out. I stumbled upon it last week on my way to Portland and even got to talk with the exhibition's "registrar" (its caretaker) who happened to be unlocking the glass cases and inspecting the automata at the time.  It was super cool, but it also made me realize that the automaton depicted in Hugo is a bit of an exaggeration.  The automata in the museum display can do nifty things, but nothing nearly as elaborate or complex as the automaton in Hugo. And, all right, it's a movie, we can't expect it to be 100% accurate, but it annoys me that the filmmakers felt that the automaton had to be even better than it would be in real life, when real automata are plenty amazing on their own. In fact, the same goes for the portrayal of silent cinema in Hugo -- Scorsese makes it look even more exciting than it actually was by using brief snippets, concentrating on Meliès' special effects, showing several films that were hand-tinted rather than black-and-white, and 3-D converting some of the Meliès films. Will a child who wants to see a silent movie after watching Hugo be bored by the real thing?

Vaclav Havel's Ethical Politics

In the wee hours of December 18, 2003, I was finishing up a research paper on Vaclav Havel for my high-school English class. Eight years later, in the wee hours of December 18, 2011, I came home from an evening of theater- and party-going to read the breaking news headline that Mr. Havel had passed away. For obvious reasons, Havel was one of my heroes, and I am working on a new blog post in response to his death. In the meantime, though, I'm posting my old research paper. I went back and reread it this week and, considering that I wrote it as a teenager, I still think it's a pretty good piece of work. The last paragraph, especially, stands as a fitting memorial to Havel's legacy. But because it's long and because it's from my high school days, I've put most of it after the jump.

Differing Reactions To Václav Havel’s Ethical Politics 

by Marissa Skudlarek, 2003

In addition to his role as the first post-Communist president of both Czechoslovakia (from 1989-1992) and the Czech Republic (1993-2003), Václav Havel has been an award-winning absurdist playwright, a dissident activist, a political prisoner, and an instrumental figure in Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution.”  Indeed, his help in winning Czechoslovakia’s independence from the Soviet satellite system launched him to the presidency.  A further factor was that he had become much admired—by both his compatriots and the Western intellectual community—for the many essays he had written summarizing his thoughts on the ideal role of politics. Seeing the post-totalitarian Communist government as full of lies and lacking legitimacy, he encouraged the Czechoslovak people to “live in the truth,” performing morally obligated acts of civil disobedience.  This ethical perspective on politics led the Czechoslovaks to believe that Havel would be their ideal first president.  Yet while leading Western figures continued to admire Havel’s morally-based policies, these same principles caused him to lose popularity in his native land.

OMPF on New Play TV

I'm about to head over to Potrero Hill to see my play in the One-Minute Play Festival.

This is just a quick note to say that there may still be a few tickets available for tomorrow, or, if you prefer to watch these plays from the comfort of your own home, tomorrow's 2 PM matinee will be streaming on New Play TV!

That's 2 PM Pacific / 5 PM Eastern. It's pretty cool to be a theater-maker in the 21st century, n'est-ce pas?

Rapunzel's Existential Crisis

I know I have been blogging infrequently. I've been busy. I've also been confused -- undergoing some of that "I'm three and a half years out of college; now what?" angst. In some ways I feel remarkably tied down: I have a job that keeps me busy, plenty of extracurricular stuff going on, there's always something hanging over my head. But in other ways, I feel "the unbearable lightness of being": I am single and childless, I am not really beholden to anyone, if I chose to abandon some of my responsibilities and do something else (or even do nothing), would it really matter?  I suppose that this truly is an "existential crisis"-- in the sense that existentialism is a philosophy that starts from the idea "I'm free; now what?"

In such moments, I convince myself that maybe I'd be happier if I gave up some of my freedom and followed "the rules." Not that rules exist these days the way they did fifty or a hundred years ago (especially in an anything-goes town like San Francisco), but if I went looking for rules and order, I'm sure I could find them. Settle down. Marry a nice man. Build your character. Stop whining so much. Volunteer to help the unfortunate. Stop wasting time on the Internet. Listen to classical music. Read great literature. Stand up straight. Make your bed. Stop questioning things, stop brooding. Stop insisting on freedom; it's only making you unhappy. You spoiled, selfish Millennial girl, who are you to think that you can live so heedlessly?

So I feel confused a lot, and guilty a lot, in that existential way.

I feel guilty that I haven't written about Ladies in Waiting, the latest No Nude Men show, which is closing this weekend -- as many of my friends are involved in it and I really do have things to say about it.

Ladies in Waiting is an evening of three short plays by women: "Woman Come Down" by Claire Rice, "Night in Jail" by Alison Luterman, and "Oily Replies" by Hilde Susan Jaegtnes. Specifically, I wanted to talk about "Woman Come Down," which really gets at all the issues I was discussing above: the existential terror of freedom; the tension between wanting to play by the rules and wanting to break them; the need for every young woman to negotiate her own way of being in the world.

All that, in the form of a fractured fairy tale.

In Claire's play, Little Red Riding Hood, rather than being a child, is a somewhat aimless young woman. She's dating the woodsman, Henry, but feels ambivalent about the relationship; she may not want to settle down and get married, but she finds it hard to articulate what she actually wants. Then, as in the original tale, Red goes to visit her grandmother, encounters a wolf (here portrayed as a rather sleazy traveling salesman with secrets of his own), and ends up taking a different path from the one she planned. Specifically, the wolf tells her about a nearby tower which imprisons a beautiful maiden -- Rapunzel!

Rapunzel has been indoctrinated to hate and fear anyone who isn't her "mother," the witch. She has never questioned her imprisonment. So it takes Red a while to break through to Rapunzel, but eventually the two women have what amounts to a philosophical debate about security and freedom, imprisonment and choice. And Red helps free Rapunzel. And later, at Grandmother's house, Rapunzel helps free Red.

It is a beautiful play, telling me what, deep down, I know to be true: I don't want to follow rules I don't believe in just for the sake of an easier life. "Down is complicated," says Rapunzel, but isn't it better than being isolated in a tower? The play acknowledges that imprisonment can be seductive and that achieving freedom can require pain and sacrifice. (Rapunzel has to cut off all her hair -- her most salient feature -- in order to make the rope ladder to free herself.) But doing only what society tells you to do, and not what you know you must do, is a recipe for a life of quiet desperation. While I must develop a set of rules for living in this world (because I do not want my present state of confusion to last forever!), I need not conform to some externally imposed list of rules.

"Woman Come Down" is directed by Stuart Bousel, with Kirsten Broadbear as the hip, bike-riding Red and Theresa Miller as the daffy, stubborn Rapunzel.

As for the other Ladies in Waiting plays, "Night in Jail" features a flamboyant performance by Broadbear as Marie Antoinette, but this character tends to overshadow the other two characters in the piece: a modern-day "celebutante" who has been arrested for drunk-driving, and the prison guard assigned to her cell. "Oily Replies" is an experimental play, a twisted ontological detective story that takes place on an oil rig. (I find it hilarious that Jaegtnes, who is Norwegian, wrote a play about an oil rig.) Fortunately, it's an experimental play that has a sense of humor about it, including a narrator who keeps losing control of the story, body parts that mysteriously go missing, and three virgins who may or may not have dandruff. Special mention to Karen Offereins for enacting a drowning-by-proxy on dry land (this will make more sense, albeit not total sense, if you see the show).

But mostly, it's "Woman Come Down," and its feminist interpretation of Red and Rapunzel, that will stick with me. It's funny, speaking of revisionist fairy tales, I love Sondheim's Into the Woods. But that show has a conservative, community-oriented message: "No one is alone."  "Woman Come Down," on the other hand, proposes that everyone is alone, individual, free -- so now what?

Ladies in Waiting plays through tomorrow night (December 17) at the Exit Theater, San Francisco. Photo of Red (Broadbear) and Rapunzel (Miller) by Claire Rice.

Creative Cancerian

Free Will Astrology is a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine. Always erudite, positive and well-written, and sometimes uncannily accurate. Of course, that could all just be confirmation bias. Nonetheless, when I read this as my horoscope the week that I begin writing a play that takes place in the WWII era, I can't help but take it as a good sign:

CANCER: "Dear Rob: Is there any way to access your horoscope archives going back to 1943? I'm writing a novel about World War II and need to see your astrological writings from back then. - Creative Cancerian." Dear Creative: To be honest, I wasn't writing horoscopes back in 1943, since I wasn't anywhere near being born yet. On the other hand, I give you permission to make stuff up for your novel and say I wrote it back in 1943. Most of you Cancerians have good imaginations about the past, and you're currently going through a phase when that talent is amplified. While you're tinkering with my history, have fun with yours, too. This is an excellent time for members of your tribe to breathe new life and fresh spin into a whole slew of your own personal memories.

Bonjour "Adieu"

A while back I posted a music video from French-Canadian singer-songwriter Coeur de Pirate, whose album of piano-driven chansons quickly became one of my favorites. I just learned that she has a new album out, Blonde. Here is the the first single, "Adieu":



Judging by this, it sounds like her sound on the new album is a little less folk and a little more '60s pop -- and who doesn't love '60s pop?  And the music video casts her as a sassy, tattooed version of Samantha from Bewitched.

Even better, the actor who plays her cheating boyfriend in the music video also plays the cute guy at the center of the love triangle in Les Amours Imaginaires (Heartbeats), which I think is my favorite movie I've seen in a theater all year. (Not that I've ended up seeing a lot of movies this year, but still.) I keep meaning to blog about Les Amours Imaginaires. Maybe all it does is prove that Québecois hipsters aren't much different from American hipsters, but the film has really stuck with me.

According to her website, Coeur de Pirate also sings on a new Christmas album, Noël! Noël!! Noël!!!, from legendary French composer Michel Legrand. Looks like her track is only available on the French edition of the album, though; the English edition has Rufus Wainwright singing "White Christmas" instead of Coeur de Pirate singing "Noël blanc". Other than that, the album seems to have the potential to become a Christmas kitsch classic, what with the lush orchestral arrangements, the First Lady of France crooning about Christmas trees, and Iggy Pop singing "The Little Drummer Boy." If there are any campy Francophones on your Christmas list, get them this album and a DVD of Les Amours Imaginaires and they will love you forever.