Happy New Year!
Jan. 1st, 2005 09:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dwgmWhoa. I must say, considering it's barely after nine o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day, there are a lot of people posting on my flist. Great stuff too, including new fic from the brilliant ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
viva_gloria, and hereswith, and elessil.
There are rainclouds floating about, but it hasn't rained on the Rose Parade in fifty years, and it's not about to start now. The parade gets more impressive every year. Mickey Mouse is the Grand Marshall this year, which is quite appropriate as this year marks the 50th anniversary of Disneyland, The Happiest Place on Earth (if one doesn't get run over by a holiday float)(Sorry,gingersnapps--you know how I adore the place, though).
Ooh. The marching band from Hawaii just went by, and I bet all those grass-skirted little girls are :::cold:::.
It has been brought to my attention that not everyone on my flist knows what the Rose Parade is. I find this mind-boggling, since it is such an Event here in L.A. and, I had assumed, all over the country and even the world, as it is televised in about 150 countries (according to Bob Eubanks). However, perhaps that's just me being silly about what is, after all, a small (though lovely)little enhancement to the scheme of things. Anyway, for those who are interested...
It is a HUGE parade, held in Pasadena (which is near Los Angeles). It's famous for its flower-covered floats, which businesses, charitable organizations, cities and even countries plan, finance (sometimes to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars), and build. Next year's floats are being designed even now.
The floats get more elaborate all the time, with clever mechanical devices, waterfalls, etc., and the taller ones must be able to bend or collapse enough to fit under a freeway overpass that is encountered along the route. Each float must be ENTIRELY covered with live flowers or other plant material, and the builders are very ingenious in the variety of fauna they come up with to produce different colors and textures.
It started out as a local parade, in 1888, sponsored by the Valley Hunt Club of Pasadena, and just grew and grew, and now it is Big Business indeed. They say a million people attend the parade, which travels along a 5.5 mile route on Colorado and Orange Grove Boulevards. Some attendees just line the sidewalks, but there are enormous banks of bleachers set up for others, many of whom have bought package deals that allow for transportation to and from the parade (the traffic is quite horrendous).
Since many of the plant materials are live flowers (and there are many millions used on the floats), putting them on the floats is an enormous undertaking, and lots of local groups volunteer to help with that (my girls did it through Girl Scouts, and I know our school was sending at least one Club to help out this year. There is work done ahead of time, too: one yearladymora and I worked at cutting dried Statice blossoms for what seemed like hours, so that some float could have a bit of fuzzy purple coloring.
Besides the amazing floats, there are the best marching bands in the world, many fascinating equestrian groups with about every breed of horse you can imagine, and flower bedecked converables with all manner of celebrities therein. It is really a marvelous entertainment, even watching on TV.
I only once attended in person--we camped out on a grassy median near the end of the parade, and it was windy that year and our tent blew down at 5:00 A.M., and then our car battery died on the way home, in the middle of all that traffic. Ugh. I would like to attend again, sometime, maybe with one of the aforementioned tours. But I really enjoy just watching it on TV on New Years Day. They show it live on several channels, but I've watched Channel 5, KTLA, for the last several years. They set up across from the Norton Simon Museum, and Bob Eubanks (whom I first encountered as a disc jockey on KRLA when I fell In Love with the Beatles and started listening to rock & roll) and Stephanie Edwards (who seems less annoying than she used to on those Lucky Supermarket commercials) are the commentators, and are always full of interesting information about the floats and other parade elements. No commercials on the live broadcast, which is also nice.
My Mother tells me she and her brothers attended back in 1928, just a few days after their arrival in Southern California. They and their parents had come out on the train, moving from their home in Rochester, New York. My Uncle Fran was 19, and my Uncle Lloyd was 17. Mom was 12. They'd spent Christmas in New Orleans, and arrived in Los Angeles a couple of days after that. They walked from Alhambra to Pasadena to see the parade that morning--my Mom says she was very impressed with all the beautiful mansions they passed on the way, and indeed, Pasadena is still full of gorgeous old houses--a very, very nice city. The parade must have looked a lot different then, but it was 40 years old, and very well-known.
In spite of it being Big Business now, it's still our hometown parade, maybe because we have worked on it, and watched it grow all these years. Those people on TV are our neighbors, the scenes in the background are the streets and city and mountain scenes some of us see during our daily activities.ladymora and I went to the Norton Simon Museum last year at this time, and had tea in the garden that looks onto that street those floats are traveling on. The whole thing is a work of art, and the result of the loving enthusiasm and work of many thousands of people. It is, indeed, an Event!
Take a look at their official website. They've done a wonderful job on it--great photos, and historical information.
We went to two movies last evening--Phantom of the Opera and Ocean's 12--before coming home to watch another on HBO, Ghost.
The best thing about repeated viewings of Ghost is watching Whoopi Goldberg do her thing: so hilarious. I love that woman.
As for Phantom, it was worth seeing, simply because I saw the musical live four times over the last twenty years (though I missed seeing it when Michael Crawford was doing it in L.A., an oversight for which I am still kicking myself). I was interested to see how it finally translated to the screen. They did as nice a job as possible, I think. Musicals are notoriously difficult to film, anyway, and Hollywood seems to have lost the talent for doing it effectively over the years, for the most part. This one was particularly difficult, I think. The Phantom's lair, which seems so spectacular when one sees the play done live, isn't quite as impressive in a movie, partly because we've grown so used to seeing really unbelievable sets in the movies, and partly because the live staging is so ingenious, and yet simple, really. Holy cats, the first time we saw it we were all just blown away! I thinkweemonkey6 was what, seven? The poor little thing was terrified when that organ started and the chandalier started rising! It had been long enough since I'd heard the music that I found it to be enjoyable again. We almost wore out our soundtrack CD we played it so often for a few years there. The young lady who does the lead, Emmy Rossum (just 18 years old!), does a beautiful job with the music and the acting, both. She radiates just the right mix of innocense and sentuality, and she's amazingly pretty. I liked the fellow they chose for Raoul, too--very handsome, very good voice. The Phantom himself I was less pleased with, at least until the end of the movie. I was watching in kind of a detatched manner, picking it apart a bit, and suddenly Christine's looking at him with pity and love and singing, " Pitiful creature of darkness ... What kind of life have you known? God, give me courage to show you you are not alone ..." and then kisses him, and not only out of pity at all. Very effecting, just as in the live performance. Poor Phantom. *sob* Other stuff I liked was MINNIE DRIVER AS CARLOTTA!!!!!!! (I have a thing for Minnie Driver--so talented and funny and cute.) The rest of the cast was pretty good, too, and the Opera House set was really beautiful--you could tell they really put some money and talent into the making of that. All in all, it was well worth spending the money and time to see it in the theater.
Not so Ocean's 12. I have to admit I liked Ocean's 11 even though I am not a Brad Pitt fan, and definitely not a George Clooney fan (as handsome as he is, you'd think he'd be less boring), but that first movie was rather cleverly done, the characters were new, and it was set in Vegas, a place with which we are very familiar so it was like a home movie, kinda. But with this second installment, it seemed like they'd exagerated everything to make it just "too cool", and, frankly, failed. The jokes fell flat; it was very difficult to follow what was going on; George was more boring than ever, Brad was wearing these boots that look like clown shoes (I think he did in the first one two, but they weren't so obviously silly-looking) and I HATE his hair like that; Elliott Gould was more annoying than in the first one; the camera work was ridiculous, jumping around like a home movie in an effort to be cutting edge and induce the audience into thinking they are part of the action, and all it did was give me a headache and make it even harder to follow the plot. Well, enough words expended on that movie. Oh, except Catherine Zeta-Jones was very cute. Almost cute enough to offset Brad's hair and shoes.
Jeesh, I started this at 9:00 this morning, and now it's almost 3:00 P.M. Everybody's still posting like mad, and emailing and stuff. Poorfabu has a whole sick family (except for herself, knock on wood), and has issued a call for hot h/c fics, so maybe I'll do a short one, before I start in again on Harry IV, which I really MUST do: this happened when I was writing Norrington's Choice, too: I got bogged down in the middle, and it took me forever to get my momentum back. I did, though, and I expect I'll get Harry IV done, too, eventually.
Happy New Year, all!
~.~
viva_gloria, and hereswith, and elessil.There are rainclouds floating about, but it hasn't rained on the Rose Parade in fifty years, and it's not about to start now. The parade gets more impressive every year. Mickey Mouse is the Grand Marshall this year, which is quite appropriate as this year marks the 50th anniversary of Disneyland, The Happiest Place on Earth (if one doesn't get run over by a holiday float)(Sorry,
gingersnapps--you know how I adore the place, though). Ooh. The marching band from Hawaii just went by, and I bet all those grass-skirted little girls are :::cold:::.
It has been brought to my attention that not everyone on my flist knows what the Rose Parade is. I find this mind-boggling, since it is such an Event here in L.A. and, I had assumed, all over the country and even the world, as it is televised in about 150 countries (according to Bob Eubanks). However, perhaps that's just me being silly about what is, after all, a small (though lovely)little enhancement to the scheme of things. Anyway, for those who are interested...
It is a HUGE parade, held in Pasadena (which is near Los Angeles). It's famous for its flower-covered floats, which businesses, charitable organizations, cities and even countries plan, finance (sometimes to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars), and build. Next year's floats are being designed even now.
The floats get more elaborate all the time, with clever mechanical devices, waterfalls, etc., and the taller ones must be able to bend or collapse enough to fit under a freeway overpass that is encountered along the route. Each float must be ENTIRELY covered with live flowers or other plant material, and the builders are very ingenious in the variety of fauna they come up with to produce different colors and textures.
It started out as a local parade, in 1888, sponsored by the Valley Hunt Club of Pasadena, and just grew and grew, and now it is Big Business indeed. They say a million people attend the parade, which travels along a 5.5 mile route on Colorado and Orange Grove Boulevards. Some attendees just line the sidewalks, but there are enormous banks of bleachers set up for others, many of whom have bought package deals that allow for transportation to and from the parade (the traffic is quite horrendous).
Since many of the plant materials are live flowers (and there are many millions used on the floats), putting them on the floats is an enormous undertaking, and lots of local groups volunteer to help with that (my girls did it through Girl Scouts, and I know our school was sending at least one Club to help out this year. There is work done ahead of time, too: one year
ladymora and I worked at cutting dried Statice blossoms for what seemed like hours, so that some float could have a bit of fuzzy purple coloring.Besides the amazing floats, there are the best marching bands in the world, many fascinating equestrian groups with about every breed of horse you can imagine, and flower bedecked converables with all manner of celebrities therein. It is really a marvelous entertainment, even watching on TV.
I only once attended in person--we camped out on a grassy median near the end of the parade, and it was windy that year and our tent blew down at 5:00 A.M., and then our car battery died on the way home, in the middle of all that traffic. Ugh. I would like to attend again, sometime, maybe with one of the aforementioned tours. But I really enjoy just watching it on TV on New Years Day. They show it live on several channels, but I've watched Channel 5, KTLA, for the last several years. They set up across from the Norton Simon Museum, and Bob Eubanks (whom I first encountered as a disc jockey on KRLA when I fell In Love with the Beatles and started listening to rock & roll) and Stephanie Edwards (who seems less annoying than she used to on those Lucky Supermarket commercials) are the commentators, and are always full of interesting information about the floats and other parade elements. No commercials on the live broadcast, which is also nice.
My Mother tells me she and her brothers attended back in 1928, just a few days after their arrival in Southern California. They and their parents had come out on the train, moving from their home in Rochester, New York. My Uncle Fran was 19, and my Uncle Lloyd was 17. Mom was 12. They'd spent Christmas in New Orleans, and arrived in Los Angeles a couple of days after that. They walked from Alhambra to Pasadena to see the parade that morning--my Mom says she was very impressed with all the beautiful mansions they passed on the way, and indeed, Pasadena is still full of gorgeous old houses--a very, very nice city. The parade must have looked a lot different then, but it was 40 years old, and very well-known.
In spite of it being Big Business now, it's still our hometown parade, maybe because we have worked on it, and watched it grow all these years. Those people on TV are our neighbors, the scenes in the background are the streets and city and mountain scenes some of us see during our daily activities.
ladymora and I went to the Norton Simon Museum last year at this time, and had tea in the garden that looks onto that street those floats are traveling on. The whole thing is a work of art, and the result of the loving enthusiasm and work of many thousands of people. It is, indeed, an Event!Take a look at their official website. They've done a wonderful job on it--great photos, and historical information.
We went to two movies last evening--Phantom of the Opera and Ocean's 12--before coming home to watch another on HBO, Ghost.
The best thing about repeated viewings of Ghost is watching Whoopi Goldberg do her thing: so hilarious. I love that woman.
As for Phantom, it was worth seeing, simply because I saw the musical live four times over the last twenty years (though I missed seeing it when Michael Crawford was doing it in L.A., an oversight for which I am still kicking myself). I was interested to see how it finally translated to the screen. They did as nice a job as possible, I think. Musicals are notoriously difficult to film, anyway, and Hollywood seems to have lost the talent for doing it effectively over the years, for the most part. This one was particularly difficult, I think. The Phantom's lair, which seems so spectacular when one sees the play done live, isn't quite as impressive in a movie, partly because we've grown so used to seeing really unbelievable sets in the movies, and partly because the live staging is so ingenious, and yet simple, really. Holy cats, the first time we saw it we were all just blown away! I think
weemonkey6 was what, seven? The poor little thing was terrified when that organ started and the chandalier started rising! It had been long enough since I'd heard the music that I found it to be enjoyable again. We almost wore out our soundtrack CD we played it so often for a few years there. The young lady who does the lead, Emmy Rossum (just 18 years old!), does a beautiful job with the music and the acting, both. She radiates just the right mix of innocense and sentuality, and she's amazingly pretty. I liked the fellow they chose for Raoul, too--very handsome, very good voice. The Phantom himself I was less pleased with, at least until the end of the movie. I was watching in kind of a detatched manner, picking it apart a bit, and suddenly Christine's looking at him with pity and love and singing, " Pitiful creature of darkness ... What kind of life have you known? God, give me courage to show you you are not alone ..." and then kisses him, and not only out of pity at all. Very effecting, just as in the live performance. Poor Phantom. *sob* Other stuff I liked was MINNIE DRIVER AS CARLOTTA!!!!!!! (I have a thing for Minnie Driver--so talented and funny and cute.) The rest of the cast was pretty good, too, and the Opera House set was really beautiful--you could tell they really put some money and talent into the making of that. All in all, it was well worth spending the money and time to see it in the theater.Not so Ocean's 12. I have to admit I liked Ocean's 11 even though I am not a Brad Pitt fan, and definitely not a George Clooney fan (as handsome as he is, you'd think he'd be less boring), but that first movie was rather cleverly done, the characters were new, and it was set in Vegas, a place with which we are very familiar so it was like a home movie, kinda. But with this second installment, it seemed like they'd exagerated everything to make it just "too cool", and, frankly, failed. The jokes fell flat; it was very difficult to follow what was going on; George was more boring than ever, Brad was wearing these boots that look like clown shoes (I think he did in the first one two, but they weren't so obviously silly-looking) and I HATE his hair like that; Elliott Gould was more annoying than in the first one; the camera work was ridiculous, jumping around like a home movie in an effort to be cutting edge and induce the audience into thinking they are part of the action, and all it did was give me a headache and make it even harder to follow the plot. Well, enough words expended on that movie. Oh, except Catherine Zeta-Jones was very cute. Almost cute enough to offset Brad's hair and shoes.
Jeesh, I started this at 9:00 this morning, and now it's almost 3:00 P.M. Everybody's still posting like mad, and emailing and stuff. Poor
fabu has a whole sick family (except for herself, knock on wood), and has issued a call for hot h/c fics, so maybe I'll do a short one, before I start in again on Harry IV, which I really MUST do: this happened when I was writing Norrington's Choice, too: I got bogged down in the middle, and it took me forever to get my momentum back. I did, though, and I expect I'll get Harry IV done, too, eventually.Happy New Year, all!
~.~
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no subject
Date: 2005-01-01 05:57 pm (UTC)Happy New Year to you!
*toasts you with eggnog & brandy*