I now know why Americans refer to this time of year as “the holidays”. I always thought that it was a politically correct term to avoid using the word “Christmas” and include other religious festivals such as Hanukkah. I was partly right.
It is also because Christmas is not the only holiday, even for Christians. There are major holiday events from the end of October to the end of December. Halloween is a big deal in this country, Thanksgiving comes a month later, then Christmas a month after that.
Of course I knew about Halloween and Thanksgiving before moving here, but I had not appreciated how quickly the festivals seem to follow each other, so that they combine to produce a holiday season. Here I am putting my Halloween photos up and Thanksgiving is only two days away!
We had our first American Halloween this year and it was a lot of fun. Our street was decked out with crazy house decorations – giant spiders on porches, white ghosts on trees, and our neighbours two doors up even had a coffin that you could feel inside to feel the “devil’s heart” (really two balloons covered in vegetable oil).
The shops were overflowing with pumpkins the week or two before Halloween so we decided to carve one. We created our first ever Jack O’Lantern following these instructions. It was quite hard work scraping out all the seeds and pulp but fun as well. (Gratuitous link: I love this ‘Jackie O Lantern’).
Here’s the result of my first pumpkin carving effort:
My husband had headed down to our shopping district earlier and seen dozens of people trick-or-treating along the main street. The shops actually employed people to stand at the front door giving out “candy” (the term for any sweet treats)!
Back at our place, the little kids started coming around with their parents from about 5pm and the older kids in groups from about 6.30pm. We stood out by our gate in our Star Wars cloaks from Tunisia giving out mini chocolate bars. We gave out 100 pieces of candy in two hours.
We didn’t see so many traditional Halloween outfits like witches and ghosts but we did see classic kids’ dress-up ensembles such as butterflies and princesses and super heroes. Many of the costumes were very creative. One of my favourites was a two-year-old girl in a homemade flapper outfit. Another was a little boy dressed as a firefighter, while his baby sister was in a dalmatian outfit (dalmatians being the traditional fire station dog).
Most of the street was out – people were either standing in front of their houses or trick-or-treating with their children – so there was a lot of neighbourly camaraderie. I really enjoyed it.
At 7pm, just as we ran out of candy, it was time for my husband and I to go and catch the streetcar downtown. We had tickets to see a screening of Nosferatu, the silent film vampire classic. (It’s basically a rip-off of Dracula and was buried for years because of a copyright dispute with Bram Stoker’s estate). We saw it at the Davies Symphony Hall, where we also saw the San Francisco Symphony perform Disney music recently. Except this time, instead of the symphony, the musical accompaniment was a huge pipe organ and a few other synchronised sound effects, such as a wind machine and a wand that created various noises when waved in the air.
Nosferatu was cool but it was also great to go downtown and check out San Francisco on Halloween. Dressing up for Halloween is not just something that children do in this city – all the adults were dressed up too. There were some classic outfits, including a press photographer with a ladder and fake ticket inspectors.
We ended the evening at a local bar to help celebrate a friend’s birthday. That was also fun and it also meant we met a few of his and his partner’s friends. I don’t think I’ve ever had that much fun on Halloween before, even as a kid. (Although I’ve been to a few good Halloween parties in the past).
The sequel to Halloween comes two days later with Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead. But that, my friends, is a subject for another post.
Last week we had the first proper rain we’ve had since I moved to San Francisco in July. The lack of rain was notable – the closest we had got was fog so heavy that it was verging on drizzle. Then last Tuesday the skies opened and we had several months all in one go – record-breaking rain, apparently.
Fortunately, the Indian summer has returned and the past few days have been filled with blue skies and glorious sunshine. Since most of July and August were cold and foggy, I’m quite keen that the sunshine sticks around for at least the rest of the month.
My in-laws are back from their trip to the East Coast and last night we went to the San Francisco Symphony at the Davies Symphony Hall. The theme was music from Disney, to celebrate the opening of the Walt Disney Family Museum, which I mentioned last post. It was a lot of fun to dress up and the music was wonderful. There were quite a few squirming children in the audience – I can see the temptation because it’s Disney but how many kids like symphonies, really? Fortunately only the well-behaved ones remained behind after the intermission.
The instrumental music included the William Tell overture, classical music from Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty and Grieg’s “March of the Dwarfs” from Snow White. We also had a soprano sing “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” from Cinderella, “Some Day my Prince will Come” from Snow White, “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins and “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio. I enjoyed the orchestral music more than the singing, especially the “March of the Dwarfs” and the “Sorceror’s Apprentice” from Fantasia. I did really love “Feed the Birds” though – it made me feel like I was back in London. (Although if you tried feeding pigeons at St Paul’s these days, you would be moved on by the City of London police pretty quickly).
A bit of Friday fluff… Do any of you watch Mad Men, set in a New York advertising in the 1950s and 1960s? I’m still on season one (via DVD) but I think it’s quite brilliant, probably one of the smartest things on television right now.
Fans of Mad Men and Muppets will appreciate this parody. Thanks to Molly Block for the link.
I do most of my TV watching either on DVD or online through Hulu.com. Currently I’m watching season five of the West Wing, the complete works of David Attenborough (we’re up to 1983’s The Living Planet) and comedy Glee. Is there anything else I should be checking out?
I have finally landed in San Francisco after nearly two months of separation from my beloved husband. The flight from London was fairly long – about 10 hours – but uneventful and comfortable. I flew premium economy with Virgin Atlantic and was quite impressed with the service.
The last week or so in London was hectic, with last minute packing and finishing off work before the big move. My visa does entitle me to work here but I have to complete some paperwork first and it can take a while to process. In the mean time, I am a lady of leisure. It’s a good opportunity to take time to set the house up, look for work and make contacts, and work on my novel.
My husband stayed in corporate accommodation when he first arrived but moved into our new rental property last weekend. He’s found us a lovely Victorian cottage with a garden in an old neighbourhood. It’s huge compared with any of our London abodes and bigger than our house in Sydney five years ago – we have two bedrooms, separate living and dining rooms, a laundry room and a private garden. It is unfurnished and all my husband has bought so far is a bed so I also get the pleasure of decorating it.
San Francisco is pretty amazing visually with steep streets and wooden Victorian houses with amazing paint detailing. Our neighbourhood has really nice cafes and shops and a good vibe. Downtown is not too far away by public transport, though we are thinking about getting bikes (those hills would give us a good work out!).
On Friday we went to the opening night of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (or the SF Squared Festival) at the Castro Theatre, an old movie palace. It is an amazing theatre with beautiful period features – I especially loved the light fittings on the ceiling. The theatre was packed and the audience was very enthusiastic – clapping and cheering throughout the opening speeches and giving a standing ovation at the end of the film. It also shows new releases at the cinema, though only one at a time.
We saw The Gaucho, a Douglas Fairbanks movie set in Argentina, and it was great, both funny and dramatic in equal measure. The film had been beautifully restored and it was accompanied by an orchestra playing the live score, just as it would have been in the old days. The scenes with the Virgin Mary were originally in technicolour and this was yet to be restored, but we got to see out-takes that had never been seen since the original showing and it was pretty visually impressive. It’s just green and red but it somehow it fools the eye into believing you are seeing a fuller spectrum of colours. I guess 3D films where you have to wear red and green glasses must use a similar concept.
Yesterday morning we went to the farmers’ market in the Ferry Building downtown. It’s open Saturdays and Tuesdays and I think it’s going to be a regular for me – lots of lovely fresh fruit and vegetables, plenty of them organic, and great bread and cheese too. This place is amazing for fresh produce – at the moment we are eating some exquisite white nectarines, which have a really unusual flavour as well as being sweet and juicy. It’s not quite so good as Europe for things like cheese though, even in the artisanal shops, but it’s not bad. The bread is fantastic – we bought a lovely sourdough loaf and another loaf of crusty cranberry and walnut bread.
This morning we went to a local cafe for breakfast. In Sydney, breakfast was probably my favourite meal to eat out, especially around the Inner West where we lived. In London, it was possible but it always seemed like more trouble than it’s worth. San Francisco is much more like Sydney in terms of its cafe culture so this morning the hubby and I loaded up respectively on eggs florentine and pancakes with nutella and banana. The key difference with Sydney is that drip (filter) coffee with free refills is ubiquitous.
In general, the vibe of the city reminds me a lot of Sydney – it’s built around a bay, the houses are old, the streets are lined with trees (including eucalpytus, bottle brush and jacaranda), and the pace of life seems similar. It’s a lot colder though – this might be California but we’re in the middle of summer and the temperature is hovering around 16C. It’s about 10 degrees warmer in London right now! Part of the reason it feels so cold is because there’s quite a bit of wind. I fear my lovely collection of cotton summer dresses may be slightly redundant here, unless it gets warmer soon.
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I’ll put up photos when I can.
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For the past few months, I have been doing an automatic daily post of my tweets. Now the feed seems to be broken – the last update was nearly a week ago. I’m not sure if this is such a bad thing as it was overwhelming any other content on the blog. You can always look me up on Twitter if you miss it, but meanwhile I’ll try to keep this blog updated with original content.
It’s really cold here in London right now – we’re apparently getting winds from the Arctic rather than the Gulf Stream. There’s often a dusting of snow on the trees and grass in the mornings, plus we’re getting heavy frosts. Apparently it got down to -12C this week. Today we’re expecting a maximum day temperature of zero celcius (32F) so it’s literally freezing. It’s meant to warm up a little next week though.
Freelance work has slowed right down in the past few months so I’m pitching furiously trying to drum up more work. I’m certainly open to any ideas or offers so please keep me in mind if you know anyone who needs writing or editing work done. I’m still doing regular posts for EcoSalon, which I’m really enjoying. I also had a piece on music copyright published recently in The Observer – it was lead media feature in the Media & Business section – and a piece on podcast fiction in The Bookseller.
The countdown to the wedding is on in earnest – the date is 4 April so it’s less than three months to the day. Yikes! We’ve booked the venues and the caterer and I’ve bought the dress. The dress fits now but I’m focusing really hard on healthy eating and exercise in the hope of shedding a few kilos and toning up so hopefully a few adjustments will be in order closer to the day. We’re hoping to get invitations out really soon.
On that note, we are still madly researching honeymoon destinations. We want to stay close to Australia to cut down on flights because my cousin Rhia’s wedding is 15 days after ours in Queensland. We were looking at New Zealand at one point until we decided we wanted a tropical island. The problem is that April is the tail end of the rainy season in places like the Great Barrier Reef, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji. We’re not really sure what that actually means – days of torrential rain and cyclones or just semi-regular showers to cool down an otherwise hot and sunny day?
We went to see Changeling last weekend and I was really impressed. We had resisted seeing it to a large extent because it looked suspiciously like an Angelina Jolie Oscar vehicle. I guess it is to an extent but it’s also a really good movie. I’m a fan of Clint Eastwood as a director and he does a really good job with this movie. It’s tightly plotted, emotional but not contrived, and it’s a real testament to his directing talent that there are so many strong performances particularly from the child actors. It’s based on a true story and was quite a pivotal point in the development and reform of the Los Angeles police force so that was interesting too. Plus, there are some fab hats – not only the Jolie character’s 1920s cloches and 1930s wide-brimmed hats but also for the men and the journalists (can I have a hat with a ticket that says ‘press’ for the next press event I attend, please?).
My blogs are in the running for a couple of awards and I would really love your help. Please consider nominating my travel site Roaming Tales for Best Travel Weblog in the 2009 Bloggies and the travelogue category of the Lonely Planet Travel Blogger Awards. Please also consider nominating The Gooseberry Fool for Best Food Weblog in the Bloggies. I would also be delighted if you would nominate either or both blogs for Best European Weblog or Best-Kept Secret Weblog or any other category that you think is appropriate. I think my chances are best with Roaming Tales so if you want to focus your fire on just one blog, that’s the one I would ask you to go for. It would mean a lot to me to have your support and if I have any degree of success, it could really boost my readership and help pay off my blogging efforts.
I haven’t actually nominated myself so I’m relying on friends, family and readers to do it for me – and apparently the more times I am nominated, the higher my chance of making the finals (it’s not based exclusively on votes – there is a panel of voters as well). The Bloggies have been running nine years and they’re quite well respected and prestigious but this is the first time they’ve had a travel category, so that’s quite exciting.
Please note, you can nominate as many times as you like in the Lonely Planet awards and you have until early February. However, you can only nominate once for the Bloggies and you only have until the end of Monday 12 January. Also with the Bloggies, you need to put at least three blogs in total forward so you can’t just nominate me.
We had our production of The Tempest last Tuesday and we are now adjusting to life beyond the play. Hopefully we’ll have a cast reunion for pre-Christmas drinks very soon! There’s also talk of reviving the play in January, which I would absolutely love to do because I feel that we’ve only just begun to realise the potential of this production.
The lovely Zarina Holmes filmed the performance for us so I can’t wait to see the video. In the mean time, she has put some still photographs on Facebook. The photos are from a semi-dress rehearsal so a few of us, including myself, are not in full costume and no one has full make-up. It should give you a flavour though!
We were aiming to do The Tempest in the style of Artaud, which means we were trying to create an experience for the audience rather than emphasising the separation between player and audience. This was most evident in the first scene, the shipwreck, but we brought elements of it throughout the play. The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most ‘magical’ plays so it lends itself well to this sort of thing.
It was very different performing with 35 people standing and sitting around me. (We had two performances with 35 people in each showing). It was theatre-in-the-round and though we encouraged people to move around so they could see, in reality they stayed pretty still so we had to angle ourselves accordingly.
It all went a lot better than I thought it might after the shambles of the dress rehearsal. The audience seemed really engaged and entertained, which was great. We hit some real high notes with the performance and no real low notes – everyone pretty much remembered their lines.
I was playing Miranda, the heroine. My only hairy moment was, in the second performance, after the scene where I confronted Caliban the monster, the strap of my dress popped open. Fortunately I was wearing a safety pin with a rose, so I mimed crying into Prospero’s shoulder (my fictional father) while I refixed it. I wonder if anyone noticed. My fellow thespian didn’t – he just thought it was an inspired heightening of the dramatic effect!
I’m proud to have worked with such a talented group of people and I hope we can do this again soon. It was the City Academy advanced class – but we’re calling ourselves the Kinky Fish Company, in honour of the blindfolds and anchovy paste used in the play. As we said on the night of the performance, we’re all really grateful for our wonderful teacher Cat Clancy and all the hard work she put in – she went way beyond the call of duty and gave up a lot of her own time unpaid to help us.
Afterwards, my wonderful real-life beloved and betrothed gave me a huge bunch of dark red roses. Aww.
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Here’s the text from the programme so you can see who the actors are, refresh yourself on the plot of The Tempest, and read more about Artaud and his theories on theatre.
By William Shakespeare, abridged and directed by Cat Clancy
A Kinky Fish production in association with City Academy
Dramatis personae
Island dwellers
Prospero Adam Mattison-Ward, Ahmed Arif, Richard Kirkcaldy Magician and Rightful Duke of Milan
Miranda Caitlin Fitzsimmons Prospero’s daughter
Caliban Gregory Lecointe and Alberto Santangelo Monster and Prospero’s slave
Ariel Teagan Mann and Naomi Segal An airy sprite and Prospero’s servant
Goddess Ceres Larissa Moran
Goddess Juno Rosalind Stern
Ship crew and passengers
Alonsa Maria Annecca Queen of Naples
Antonia Michelle McKay Prospero’s sister and usurper Duchess of Milan
Ferdinand Tadhg O’Brien Prince of Naples, Alonsa’s son and Miranda’s love interest
Gonzalo Gregory Lecointe A nobleman
Sebastian Alberto Santangelo Alonsa’s brother
The Master Larissa Moran Ship captain
Boatswain Rosalind Stern
Trinculo Larissa Moran
A drunk shipwrecked mariner, a dull fool
Stephano Rosalind Stern
A drunk shipwrecked butler
Supporting cast Whole company Mariners, nymphs, huntsmen, sound effects etc
Synopsis
The magician Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan, and his daughter, Miranda, are stranded on an island. Twelve years ago Prospero’s jealous sister Antonia – helped by Alonsa, the Queen of Naples – deposed him and set him adrift with the five-year-old Miranda. The nobleman Gonzalo secretly helped Prospero, upgrading his small and shoddy boat, supplying him with food and water, and books from Prospero’s library.
Possessed of magic powers due to his great learning and prodigious library, Prospero is reluctantly served by a spirit, Ariel, whom he had rescued from imprisonment in a tree. Ariel had been trapped there by the witch Sycorax, who died prior to Prospero’s arrival. Prospero also keeps the witch’s son Caliban, a deformed monster, as his slave.
The play opens as Prospero, having divined that his sister Antonia, is on a ship passing close by the island has raised a storm (the tempest of the title) that causes the ship to run aground. Also on the ship are Queen Alonsa, Alonsa’s brother Sebastian, Alonsa’s royal advisor Gonzalo, Alonsa’s son, Ferdinand, plus crew members. Prospero, by his spells, separates the survivors of the wreck into several groups. Alonsa and her son Ferdinand believe one another dead.
Prospero works to establish a romantic relationship between Ferdinand and Miranda; the two fall immediately in love, but Prospero worries that “too light winning [may] make the prize light”, and puts Ferdinand through a series of tests. He also decides that after his plan to exact vengeance on his betrayers has come to fruition, he will break and bury his staff, and “drown” his book of magic.
In the first of two sub-plots, Caliban falls in with Stephano and Trinculo, two drunken crew members, and attempts to raise a rebellion against Prospero (which ultimately fails). In another sub-plot, Antonia and Sebastian conspire to kill Alonsa and Gonzalo, so that Sebastian can become King. They are thwarted by Ariel, at Prospero’s command.
In the conclusion, all the main characters are brought together before Prospero, who forgives Antonia and Alonsa, pardons Caliban and uses his magic to ensure that everyone returns to Italy. Ariel, as her final task for Prospero, is charged to prepare fair sailing weather and she is then set free to the elements.
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty
In our production of The Tempest we have explored some of the ideas of French dramatist Antonin Artaud. He believed that the theatre should affect the audience as much as possible, so he used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound and performance.
In his book The Theatre and Its Double, Artaud expressed his admiration for Eastern forms of theatre, particularly the Balinese. He admired Eastern theatre because of the codified, highly ritualised and precise physicality of Balinese dance performance, and advocated what he called a “Theatre of Cruelty”. At one point, he stated that by cruelty, he meant not exclusively sadism or causing pain, but just as often a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality.
He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language, halfway between thought and gesture. Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all theatre is physical expression in space.
Imagination, to Artaud, is reality; dreams, thoughts and delusions are no less real than the “outside” world. Reality appears to be a consensus, the same consensus the audience accepts when they enter a theatre to see a play and, for a time, pretend that what they are seeing is real.
The biggest lesson I need to learn in life is that I can do anything I want but I can’t necessarily do everything I want. I have to choose and focus. That’s hard.
Actually, maybe I can do everything I want – just not all at once. Rose Kennedy apparently once said: “You can have it all, my dear, but you can not have it all at once. Life is a journey with many different adventures and each part of it is special. Sometimes you will have to focus on the task at hand.”
It still comes down to the same thing. I need to choose what to focus on right now.
I am doing a lot of things in my life, all of which I enjoy. Yet there is an opportunity cost with anything I choose to do and right now I don’t feel that I’m concentrating on the really important things.
Here are some of the things I’m doing right now:
Working as a freelance journalist – balancing making a living, pitching for new and interesting work and trying to figure out how my strategy to survive and thrive in a changing industry.
General life stuff, including trying to keep fit and healthy.
Volunteering two to three times a month at the British Museum.
Trying to write a novel.
Amateur theatre.
Once of my most important goals is to finish writing my novel. To be honest, I’m not really making great progress on this goal.
I’m wondering if there is anything I should give up in order to make the time for this. I’m loath to give up the theatre given that I really love doing it and also aspire to write plays in the future – though maybe trying to do the novel writing and acting at the same time is too much. The British Museum doesn’t take up much of my time and I’ve already cut back so I’m comfortable with that. I obviously can’t give up life, or wedding organisation, or work, even if I wanted to.
The area where I feel I can cut back is social media. As I mentioned, I have three main blogs, plus also the occasional dated update on my professional site or True Wild Catches and Century of Books. All of this takes time and it’s not just a matter of writing my own posts and forgetting about them – the fun comes in being part of a blogging community, interacting with other bloggers, micro-blogging on Twitter (where I am undoubtedly spending too much time), using tools like StumbleUpon and Digg.
All this stuff is a lot of fun but it takes up a lot of time. I find it very hard to do social media in moderation – it’s the kind of thing where you have to jump in feet first, and as my frequent Twitter updates show, it’s very addictive! And really, with my industry (media) changing so quickly and so profoundly, it’s essential that I keep abreast of it. If anything, I should be doing more, not less – it would be valuable for me to try podcasting and online video production, for example.
The problem with blogging, as novelist A.L. Kennedy points out, is that there’s no definable end. You can never say a blog is done and there’s always more you can do for it, whether in writing, site design or promotion. I’m beginning to feel that part of the answer for me might be to reduce my blogs. It’s very hard to put a blog to death though so the question would be how – should I consolidate everything under my real name or on this blog? Or should I merge my food and travel blogs in some way? Or just stop writing one of them?
The other thing I really like the idea of is the Secular Sabbath – one day a week where you don’t use the computer or a mobile phone. I find this really appealing – I love the internet but the truth is, my brain is sometimes filled with digital detritus. I don’t know if there’s been any research but I do wonder whether too much time online is just as stifling to creativity and deadening as watching too much television.
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to best use my time? If you agree with my diagnosis, how should I rationalise my blogs?
I now know why Americans refer to this time of year as “the holidays”. I always thought that it was a politically correct term to avoid using the word “Christmas” and include other religious festivals such as Hanukkah. I was partly right.
We had our first American Halloween this year and it was a lot of fun. Our street was decked out with crazy house decorations – giant spiders on porches, white ghosts on trees, and our neighbours two doors up even had a coffin that you could feel inside to feel the “devil’s heart” (really two balloons covered in vegetable oil).
We didn’t see so many traditional Halloween outfits like witches and ghosts but we did see classic kids’ dress-up ensembles such as butterflies and princesses and super heroes. Many of the costumes were very creative. One of my favourites was a two-year-old girl in a homemade flapper outfit. Another was a little boy dressed as a firefighter, while his baby sister was in a dalmatian outfit (dalmatians being the traditional fire station dog).