TODAY IS CULT OF LINCOLN’S 7TH BIRTHDAY! Wheeee!

Some Links For You:

Opening Credits to Burton’s Sweeney Todd. Catch it before it gets removed! Maybe it’ll look better on screen than on freaking YouTube, but I’m less impressed with this than I was with the actual musical numbers I saw last month. Remind me again why they decided not to open with the Ballad?

Pottercast scored an interview with JK Rowling! The first part of the interview is downloadable now, and I just finished listening. Intriguing stuff! She has a wonderful rapport with her hosts, and she speaks with such clarity, from minute details of her books to the heavier issues they raise. Well worth a listen.

Tanker Safety — a sketch of Pythonesque brilliance

Great new trailer for Horton Hears a Who.

The Superest — an ongoing game between two cartoonists, in which they take turns creating superheroes/supervillains with powers that defeat the powers of the hero/villain before it. Hilarious!

A Pterry Thank You Project — a fanart celebration, to be compiled and sent to the man next month.

Global Warming — an argument for action

Torchwood Series 2 Trailer. I can’t believe I’m going to watch this. XD (Woah, was that Simon Pegg I saw for a split-second?)

So! The concert!

Christina Courtin opened, and I was actually a little disappointed. In the time since I saw her perform last July, I’d built her up in my head as a paragon of soul-nourishing cuteness until she became my mental musical equivalent of Pushing Daisies. But tonight, she chose a much more aggressive set list, and as she skipped around, singing with her whole body, rather than being cute she just came across as spastic. Toward the end, she sang “Foreign County,” which helped, but the cuteness train had already jumped the tracks.

It was unfortunate, as I adore her voice and I always support musicians experimenting and moving in different directions, but… no. Not so much. Hopefully her upcoming CD will have more cuteness, like her cover of the Beatles’ “Honey Pie,” which caused puppies and kittens to spontaneously manifest into being all over the Union Hall stage. Oh well. If you were a foreign country, I’d still visit you, Christina!

(Good LORD I love my iPhone! It takes such pretty, pretty pictures!)

By the time Vienna Teng came onstage, I’d drifted up to the front of the room (it was a “standing room only”-type affair, so I was standing against the stage. As my luck would have it, they ended up maneuvering her piano so that she was sitting smack-dab in front of me! I could have reached out and poked her with a short stick, had I a mind to. Not quite a ruler, perhaps, but a yardstick would have been more than adequate.

She did a very long, very varied show, which included a cover of Radiohead’s “Idioteque.” I’ve never known her to do covers, so that was a fun surprise! She performed a lot of my favourite songs, including “Blue Caravan,” “Pontchartrain,” “Gravity,” “Unwritten Letter #1,” “Homecoming,” and “City Hall,” the last of which received RIOTOUS cheers. It’s clearly a song that means a great deal to a lot of people, and for good reason.

Her band remained–as always–excellent, especially her percussionist (Andrew Chen, IIRC?). See him rock in her encore performance of “Hope on Fire,” on YouTube already! God bless the internet. And DUDE, you see that head obscuring the shiny speaker in front of her? THAT’S MY HEAD! I have a sweet and photogenic head, yo.

And hmm, I realized in the process of writing this that I should probably blog about seeing Tim Burton speak at the Lincoln Center at some point, as it was quite awesome. Basically, what you should know is:

  1. Tim Burton is awesome.
  2. Sweeney Todd is going to be awesome.
  3. I have conclusive proof that at least the musical numbers “My Friends,” “Epiphany,” and “Johanna” (the final one, sung by all the main players) are awesome, so one can infer the rest of the film will be awesome as well.

And there was much rejoicing.

GLEE! James Marsters’ site just announced that he’ll be doing the audio book of Small Favor, tenth book of The Dresden Files! Details here.

And FREAKING SQUEE! I just got THE LAST TICKET to see Tim Burton at the Lincoln Center next week! …At least, the last Mezz seat. Which… drat. Probably means it’s the worse in the Mezz section. I should have gone with Balcony. But I just bought my ticket, so oh well. I’m sure every seat will be a good one! Stupid confusing thing saying “1 ticket left,” misleading me and making me rush my decision. But it will be awesome, and EEE TIM BURTON.

Blee, the Sweeney Todd trailer is out! Grab a direct download in deliciously high-res from Film Ick. The little views we get into musical numbers like “Poor Thing,” “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir,” “Epiphany,” and “By the Sea” make me even more gleeful about Tim Burton’s translation. Is it January yet?

Aaaand I’m now writing my Psych paper on Buffy. I believe this nicely rounds out my Fandom in Academia series:

Freshman Year:

  • Visual Communications — Lord of the Rings. Comparative visual analysis of equivalent scenes in two film versions of “Return of the King.”
  • Digital Design Foundations — Sandman. Reinterpretation of The Endless in my “Sandman Series.” In this class, I also did designs inspired by Monty Python‘s Ministry of Silly Walks and Ender’s Game.

Sophomore Year:

  • Copyright and Culture — Harry Potter. Discussion of legal implications for different types of fan art (focusing on the Harry Potter fandom)
  • 3D Computer Modeling — The Nightmare Before Christmas and Star Wars. I modeled an environment from TNMBC and an Imperial walker from Star Wars. Also a creature based on the Jabberwock, but I’m not exactly in the Lewis Carroll fandom.
  • Networked Life — Buffy, sort of. We were supposed to create a network of absolutely anything, so created a network of Buffy guest actors, linked based on if they’d appeared in an episode together. I ended up discussing the arc structure of Buffy a bit in my analysis of the shape of the graph, but it wasn’t really about Buffy itself.

Junior Year:

  • Film History — Star Wars. The impact of the original Star Wars trilogy on the special effects industry.
  • Virtual World Design — Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Created a video game set in an environment based on an image from The Wolves in the Walls.

Senior Year:

  • Feminist Fairy Tales — Terry Pratchett. Theories of Revision in Tepper’s Beauty and Pratchett’s Witches Abroad. (We read the book in class, mind you!)
  • Film Analysis and Methods — Firefly/Serenity. Comparison of themes of “otherness” in Serenity and The Searchers
  • Science and Literature — Doctor Who. Senior Year, Empathy with aliens in War of the Worlds, Ender’s Game, and DW 1×06 “Dalek.”
  • And now: Psychology of Judgments and Decisions — Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The indirectness bias in “The Gift” and other episodes.

Why yes, I am awesome. I accept your love and I return it.