Happy New Year!

So 2010 is over, and I’m still running myself ragged with the dual retail gigs. That should be easing up now that the big winter-holiday season is over. I should be getting back some brain function and free time to dedicate to the Great Job Hunt. I’ve been slacking on that for about a month now. Yes, yes, who knows what I could’ve missed, but it’s hard to work on filling out applications properly when one hasn’t been eating or sleeping properly. At least I know I’m not alone in having trouble getting work in a library – one of my friends from grad school might be considering joining the Peace Corps or a similar organization so she can have a little adventure before settling into Responsability.

Aside from running myself into the ground, I’ve been trying to find little things to amuse myself and hopefully maintain a semblance of sanity and functionality (for values of those terms). I believe I’ve mentioned the German-language musicals I’ve been exploring. I’ve had Tanz Der Vampires for years, having bought the German album while getting excited about the sadly short-lived Broadway production. I started finding more this January when a friend showed me clips from Elisabeth on YouTube. I’ve known there were multiple international versions of musicals since high school when I saw the international version of “One Day More” at the end of the Les Miserables Tenth Anniversary Concert and got Japanese cast recordings of Les Miz and Phantom of the Opera.

I’ve also been a fan of Frank Wildhorn since high school. He composed the music for Jekyll & Hyde, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Civil War: Our Story In Song, and Dracula – those are the ones that I know made it to Broadway. After poking around on Amazon.com, iTunes and another legal MP3-downloading site, I found out that he’s had a couple shows produced in German. I knew about Jekyll & Hyde years ago, though I just got the album yesterday. There’s also a German version of Dracula, as well as Rudolf – Affaire Mayerling (based on Empress Elisabeth’s son) and Der Graf Von Monte-Christo. I haven’t quite gotten into Rudolf yet, but I must say I’ve been enjoying Dracula and Monte-Christo. Good music and good voices performing. I’ve become a fan of Thomas Borchert, a very good baritone who sings Dracula and Edmond Dantes/The Count in those respective albums, and Lyn Liechty who sings Mina on the Dracula album and Lucy in the German cast album of Jekyll & Hyde.

Merry Christmas, Happy Yule, or whatever it is you celebrate.

Christmas has snuck up on me again. As usual, I’ve got no big plans – working during the day, probably going to get some (hopefully good) Chinese food for dinner, watching a movie on my ‘puter if I’m not too tired, and sleeping. If I happen to find Nightmare Before Christmas on TV, I might go for that. I haven’t seen it in years, and I miss it. Ooooh, sleep! I’ve been looking forward to that for weeks as I play the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “What Is Christmas?” on a somewhat continuous loop in my head. Merry Christmas, Happy Yule, Blessed Solstice, and happy whatever else you might celebrate. Happy Hogswatch, even! It’s a time for holly, and being jolly, and other things ending in -olly. I’ve even been talking to Santa a bit. He’s a good guy, but I’m not expecting anything special - I usually see him when he’s on his way home from greeting kids all day at the mall, and I didn’t submit a formal letter or offer cookies or anything like that.

I’ve slowly been gathering more good and interesting music this season. I was looking around online last night (legal MP3 sites, I promise!), and I got hold of a track called “Ich bin Herr im Hause.” I had to listen to a bit to figure out exactly what it is, but it’s the German version of “Master of the House” from the musical Les Miserables. This is awesome for me because “MotH” is the song that got me interested in Les Miz, and doubly so because it sounds like the principal singer is Thomas Borchert. I recently came to appreciate him because he sang the title role in the German version of Frank Wildhorn’s “Dracula” that I got a month or two ago. Huzzah!

In other news, I finished Robert Heinlein’s “For Us the Living: A Comedy of Customs” today. This was Mr. Heinlein’s first book, and it is quite different from the others I’ve read so far. Spider Robinson’s introduction helped me appreciate at least one angle of what Mr. Heinlein had been trying to do with the book, aside from telling a story. “For Us the Living” offers an interesting alternate future, and preaching and socioeconomic diatribe aside I can’t help but wonder what it might be like to have grown up in that kind of society.

Another long week

So it’s the week before Christmas week, and I feel like I’m working myself to death. As with recent weeks, I’ve been too tired to conduct proper job-hunting strategies. I know, I know – who knows what opportunities I could be missing by my failure to look? But I truly am exhausted – my last day off was Thanksgiving Day, and I’m going to have to enter and maintain Caffiend Mode if I have any hopes of making it to Christmas Eve without crashing and burning. I can do it then – Christmas Day is my only projected day off between now and whenever my seasonal part time job finishes up in January, and I can sleep as long as I need to then. Hopefully I’ll be able to kick back into Library Job Hunter Mode in January, and maybe libraries will be posting more jobs that are my speed, right? I’m still trying to tell myself there’s a library out there that desperately needs me, and I just have to keep sending my resume out until they find me. Tired as I am, I’m still clinging onto my dream of becoming an orangutan with tenure.*

With all the work-related stress I’ve brought crashing down on myself, I’m still trying to keep myself slightly distracted and happy. I’ve been reading good books when I can find the time, and hunting down new and interesting music. I started getting interested in German musical theatre about 7 or 8 years ago, when I heard the show ”Dance of the Vampires” was going to be on Broadway. It’s based on Roman Polanski’s 1967 movie “The Fearless Vampire Killers,” the music was written by Jim Steinman (famous for having written so many epicly angsty Meat Loaf ballads), and it first appeared in Germany as “Tanz Der Vampires”. I shelled out for the double CD cast recording, and I don’t regret the decision. I enjoyed the Americanized version (it was a treat to see Michael Crawford and Rene Auberjonois live on stage), but I admit that the full German recording was a lot better. They made the American version almost horridly cheesy with many the stupid joke, and the audience was laughing half the time when they recognized a tune almost directly ganked from Meat Loaf.

Anyway, I started getting interested in other German musicals this past January when a friend introduced me to the musical “Elisabeth” via videos posted on YouTube. “Elisabeth” is based on the life of Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress-consort of Austria and wife of Emperor Franz Josef I. I haven’t read much into her life yet, but the musical is narrated by Luigi Lucheni (the guy who assassinated her) and implies that she had a lifelong affaire de coeur with an anthropomorphic personification of Death. The music is amazing, and I would buy a copy of the DVD if I could find a way to make my American (and probably NTSC-formatted) laptop play PAL-format discs from Germany. Nein sprechen** Deutsch, but this show almost makes me wish I’d taken German in high school instead of Japanese. The following links are to some songs from the DVD I mentioned (a filmed 2005 production) that are on YouTube.             Prolog

                                                                                                                      Wenn Ich Tanzen Will

                                                                                     Die Schatten Werden Langer

*See Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and the recurring character of The Librarian at Ankh-Morpork’s Unseen University.

**I mean “schrepen”! I probably typed “sprechen” because I heard the word in the song “Die Schatten Werden Langer” and it sounds a bit similar. Not that I know the English equivalent of “sprechen” just yet …

Stress and a little disappointment

I managed to do a little job searching last night through the sleep-deprived fog that is my brain. The one or two things that caught my interest were out of my level – I took the Cataloging 101 class at Simmons, but I’m in no way ready to be the responsible cataloger in charge of training others. Maybe I’ll have some more functional time outside of my jobs during the coming week.

The disappointment I referred to is in relationship to Julie Taymore’s movie of The Tempest. It’s opening tomorrow, and I probably won’t get to see it. The closest movie theatre to me that’s going to be showing it is in New York City, and I won’t have the time to get in there until Christmas Day. That’s my only forseeable day off between now and some time in January (hence the stress), and I don’t know if I’ll feel up to hauling into the City just to see it, much as I’ve been looking forward to it. It was suggested to me that there might be a wider release as time goes on, and I can only hope. I would have been all for going to see it after work one day if it was going to be in the big movie theatre near me, or even in the art house a few towns over, but this is a little much. I’m one sad Shakespeare geek at the moment – I may have to console myself with a Shakespeare movie marathon later – I’ve got Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet, the Richard III with Ian McKellen, As You Like It with Bryce Dallas Howard and Brian Blessed, the Al Pacino Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream with Kevin Kline, and probably a couple others sitting around.

Happy Hanukah, y’all!

Here it is the second night of Hanukah, and I’ve got nothing new and exciting to report on the Great Job Hunt for yet another week. As I may have mentioned previously, I find it difficult to focus on hunting for Proper Work when I’m this tapped out from working two retail gigs. I haven’t really done anything for the holidays, other than going to turkey dinner last week, but I have been making tater latkes from mix. I forgot to pick up an onion yesterday, but Streits mix is decent when cooked up with cracked black pepper in it, and it was even better with the sour cream I picked up on my way home today.

I heard what I truly believe is the Groaner Joke of the Season today at work, and I would like to share it here:                  “Why should you keep a sheet of aluminum foil under your menorah?”                                                                                              “To catch the wicky leaks!”                                                                                                                                                                                          One lady I told this joke to said that That Guy (the one who leaked the closely-held government secrets on WikiLeaks, not the one who told me the joke) should be taken out and hung. I haven’t really been paying much attention to the whole hoo-haw.

I also read about what might be termed an Epic Fail on Broadway: Julie Taymor’s Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark. Its previews started this past week. The sets were going to pieces, the ramped-up technical tricks weren’t working, and apparently Bono and The Edge couldn’t come up with a truly awesome score for the piece. In other words, The Show Is Broken. Like some friends of mine, I do feel bad for them – there have been all sorts of delays because of the directorial desire to have Spidey and various other characters flying all over the place on wires, and I heard that a couple actors have had accidents leading to broken bones. The show started out $65 million in the hole, and I don’t know how optimistic I’m feeling about their ability to web-crawl their way back out. I hope they can, but Ms. Taymor’s Tempest movie better be as bloody awesome as I’m hoping.
http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/amplifier/25934/u2s-spider-man-musical-spins-tangled-web-of-disaster-at-first-preview?nc