weird words

You won't be surprised that I have to confess that I've fallen behind with my assignments.
Still, there's something else I have to get out of the way before I can finish my marking. (I'm nearly there and will call it a night after posting this, which means I've got to get up early tomorrow morning.)

This afternoon - while avoiding the desk of course - I watched a documentary on arte about the legend of the Flying Dutchman. For those of you who have got access to arte, it is repeated on January 14: description in French.
I remember that once upon a time frenchani wrote a post connecting the Buffyverse and Wagner's opera The Flying Dutchman. I can't remember much of it and I'm definitely not a Wagnerianer, but I would be interested in revisiting it. Do you still have it somewhere?
It was interesting to see how this legend of a ghost ship was fleshed out and went through several re-workings and versions especially in the 19th century with its penchant for gothic stories. Pirates of the Caribbean is probably the best-known and newest incarnation of the many ghost ship stories around.
Then I suddenly realized that I wrote about a ghost ship not so long ago when I linked The Rhime of the Ancient Mariner and Serenity. I had focused on the captains in my earlier post, but I forgot about the ships.
And here is another twist: When Mal and his crew travel to Miranda through Reaver territory, they masquerade as a ghost ship. He doesn't kill the albatross, but he still chooses to become the captain of a ghost ship - for a short time only, of course. And again, we get to see the unusual perspective - the living attempting to fool the the other ghost ships. Of course, for the sailors of the past encounters with ghost ships were just as scary as the tales of the reavers are for the folks in the Fireflyverse.

Remember that post from way back about entertainment as opposed to serious cultural offerings? That it might make Serenity a hard sell?

Well, it looks like the reviewers don't quite know how to classify this strange beast.

Serenity opened in Germany last Thursday. In my town they are currently only showing it in German. Their loss. I won't sit through it again in the dubbed version. There are trailers on television, but you have to be 16 to be able to see the film - I guess Mr Universe is responsible for that.

Yesterday afternoon I had a look at the first reviews.

( high and low )

Apart from that there was the usual bad research - where someone put Nathan Fillion in I, Robot and the stuff that was directly taken from the press releases as well as several interesting interviews with Joss Whedon.

I live in a rather colourful part of the city. Or you could call it multi-cultural, but this adjective has become so loaded with preconceptions and political implications that I don't want to use it anymore. Basically it once was a traditional workers' neighbourhood but when living standards rose and the Germans could afford to move to the suburbs, the relatively cheap housing attracted many immigrants - and later the students. A lot of the buildings were badly hit by bombs in the war and so we have a mix of early 20th century houses with lots of ornaments (some still with obvious war scars) combined with the more sober but often ugly architecture of the second half of the century. The parts of my city with more surviving examples of pre-WWI architecture have already become gentrified and there are first signs that it is happening here as well.
It will take time though and I guess I prefer my neighbourhood as it is.
There's the Turkish supermarket for example with the freshest vegetable and meat, the health-food shop run by a collective (its members can be seen and heard with their drums in the park in summer), the Catholic community walk-in centre, the slightly dodgy garages and shops selling car parts, the various ethnic fast food places, the Turkish barbers, the semi-legal betting shops and the cafés frequented by men hailing from the same country, the same village possibly.
Especially the Italian cafés are fascinating. Their visitors look like they've just stepped off the set of The Sopranos: There are the guys in shiny tracksuits standing guard outside the door with a mobile phone glued to their ear, smoking and ogling the passing girls. Then there are the middle-aged men, well-groomed, but slightly seedy, wearing elegant suits and parking their expensive and ostentatious cars on the sidewalk for everyone to admire. If the weather permits one or two of the older generation will abandon their card games, take their chairs and sit outside making jokes with the lads and discussing the football or Ferrari. You don't see women among them - there might be one behind the bar, but it's a very male club.
Are they aware of the stereotype they're presenting? Or am I responding to the stereotype? Do they behave and dress this way because they've seen it in the movies? Or is the other way around?
I guess it's a bit of both.
There's a new betting shop across the street; it's called The Italian Job.

I've spent most of the day smearing red ink all over my students' exam papers. For once I managed to keep my hands clean. That's quite funny as the exam text is an excerpt of Act 2, Scene 2 of Macbeth including these lines:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Now wasn't that a sneaky way of doing the Shakespeare meme?


I'm still processing Serenity. I've had some more thoughts about the film and I found a very helpful review that I will use to explain my feelings about the film. I'm not very good at coming up with original ideas, you see, so I need somebody else's words to help me state my opinion. And writing about it helps me see things more clearly. The writer mentions a couple of spoilers, so don't read the whole thing if you wish to remain unspoiled.
I don't wholeheartedly agree with him, but he makes several valid points.

( No spoilers. )