I recently finished the book "Boneshaker" by Cherie Priest. I quite enjoyed this book. It was quick moving with likable characters and an interesting plot with just enough detail held back to make me want to keep reading but not so much that it was too confusing or hard to follow. The setting is Seattle some 20 years after an engineering contest gown awry in which a machine that was meant to dig for gold burrows its way through the city wreaking havoc and unleashing a deadly gas from under the earth onto the surface into the city. They story is full of fantastic Victorian mechanical contraptions like flying machines and mechanical prosthetic arms. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys light science fiction (and by light I mean less than 3 inches thick with minimal subplot and a list of main characters that can be counted on one hand).

I also read "The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters" by G.W. Dahlquist not terribly long ago. I think I enjoyed the writing style in this book a bit more but the plot was more confusing which made the overall experience a bit less enjoyable. The book is set in Victorian England and although there were less fantastical machines throughout the story there was one rather impressive and mysterious one surrounded by (dangerous) secret society. The main character is a somewhat predictable female - small, attractive, spunky, and of course capable of surviving any situation no matter how unlikely. She is accompanied by two much more likable male characters in her quest to uncover the truth and although the story is wrapped up sufficiently at the end of the first book to give one a sense of completion there is a second volume in the series which I have been considering reading but haven't yet gotten around to it. I was just having a quick skim of some of the Amazon reviews and while it is true that there is a rather long description of cream tea early in the book it makes me crave a hot cup of black tea with a bit of creamy milk every time I think about it.

I recently went to see a bit of fringe theater at a warehouse nearby with a few friends. The name of the play was "Money" and the play was apparently inspired by a French play about a banking crisis. Inside the warehouse was a huge black structure which was reported to be a Victorian machine of unknown purpose. When the play started the machine began producing steam and making lots of loud mechanical machine type noise and we were led up the stairs into the machine. Throughout the play we were led into different compartments which were full of trap doors and glass floors through which various characters appeared and disappeared wearing various costumes. At one point a door in the ceiling opened up and a whole bunch of multi colored plastic balls fell through into the middle of the room. Generally the play made little sense although I think one of the characters was selling something and possibly we as the audience were the buyers. There were some amusing moments early on and certainly the set was fantastic but overall I was more entertained by the set than the actual play. Generally I disapprove of audience participation although in this case it mostly worked well (except when I got hit in the head rather hard by one of the plastic balls that a fellow audience member threw with from across the room). As far as fringe goes it has quite a high production quality but in terms of conveying any distinguishable message I would rate it rather low.

We saw two productions at the International Mime festival this year. The first one was an adaptation of the story of Tamar from the Old Testament using large puppets and the second one was an abstract piece called The Timidity of Bones. The puppets worked in some ways but the actors or mime artists or whatever they are called kept disconnecting their heads which I found a bit confusing. Also having read the story before I left it seemed as if the artists took some liberties with the relationships between Tamar and her dead husband's brothers but overall but to be honest not as much liberty as I was expecting them to have taken given the womens' lib promo in the description. Also they had voice/written narration which seemed a bit like cheating for mime.

The second production was my favorite. From the festival website: "Eerily impressed into the surface of a large, luminous white screen, the outline of bones and skeletal forms appear." I think it was actually a man and a woman who may have been at least mostly naked who were pressing their own bodies into the white screen but they certainly got the job done. Aside from the loud sound track/sounds of crackling electricity it was almost memorizing and short (only 30 minutes) - the best combination. The way the artists pushed their bodies and especially their arms and hands into the screen it really did look like bones that were sort of rising and sliding along the screen and then slipping back the same way that dolphins and whales do on the surface of water. It was truly artistic and memorable and has made me more of a fan of the mime festival. I will be looking forward to its return next year.

The name sums it up. This is a Clint Eastwood cowboy movie that Kim got for Christmas and as far as cowboy movies go it is pretty watchable. Unfortunately it lacks the standard happy ending good guy triumph energy which normally comes at the end of a cowboy movie that makes you want to swing your hat in the air and yell ye-haw! Ok well to be honest I haven't actually seen that many cowboy movies and the ones I have watched put me to sleep but that's not really the point. Clint Eastwood plays a retired gunmen who embarks on a journey to deliver some payback to a guy who knifed a prostitute and each of the characters he meets along the way is suffering from the same affliction: a general lack of forgiveness in the hard harsh desert of the west. It's a good week day movie to watch in the evening after dinner to spark a bit of conversation especially if you've seen enough of Eastwood's other movies to enter into a compare and contrast college essay sort of discussion. Fortunately when Kim and I watched it we'd had just enough wine to avoid Kim's follow up essay about imagery and foreshadowing but you should feel free to have one without me if the mood strikes you.

I didn't have too many expectations when I went to see this movie and in my opinion that is the only way to approach a blockbuster. I had seen a 10 minute filler show (the kind that fills the space between a show that lasted 50 minutes and the next hour break on tv) on the special effects which was what made me interested in the first place but that was about all I knew. Overall I though the movie was pretty good although it was unnecessarily long. When I thought we'd reached at least the 1.5 hour mark I thought to myself, well this isn't so bad the movie is more than half over and I don't feel like I've been sitting here all that long at all! As I'm sure you can guess in retrospect it was no where near an hour from the end of the movie. In fact I was starting to suspect that I was loosing any tangible connection I had to the time space continuum and that it would never end and one day I would finally stumble out of the theater only to discover floating cars and clothes made out of foil but then it finally ended and much to my relief the underground trains were still underground and connected to the tracks (I made that sentence extra long to give you a sense of my suffering). The special effects were as impressive as promised although I'm not convinced that the 3d really added much and I'm certainly not interested in watching my tv at home in 3d. There was a bit of a conservation/its wrong to wipe out indigenous people groups just for cash sort of message but most important is the message that as long as the attractive hero is on your side you can't help but win. I'm not sure I came out quite as concerned as the Pope did about the worship of nature especially since all those plastic 2d glasses were constructed as single use non recyclable items. Overall I would give this movie a thumbs up but as the guy on the train said on the way home "it really wasn't worth seeing twice"

I recently finished "Lost in a Good Book" by Jasper Fforde and I highly recommend it. It was witty and amusing and smart and entertaining and more importantly had just enough characters and plot twists to leave me wanting more rather than making me want to stuff the book into a small space under the bed in hopes that it would shrink before I found it again. The heroine of the series is Thursday Next who joins 'Jurisfiction', the policing agency within the book world, to try to track down a man who she trapped in an Edgar Allen Poe story in a previous episode (The Eyre Affair - which I also highly recommend). She teams up with Miss Havesham from Dickens, who I might add is rather more amusing than in her original incarnation, who helps her master book travel. Reading Jasper Fforde books gives me alternating desires to read more classics so I can get more of the literary references he makes to wanting to read more of his books so I can enjoy the witticisms that I do get. His characters are likable (the good guys anyway) and free from foul language and rampant sex and some even have cute and slightly stupid pets. If you are looking for a fun read that will make you want to read more then this is the book for you!

It's been a while since I reviewed one of Kim's random dvd selections but the other night we watched one called 'Walkabout' about two English kids whose dad abandons them in the Australian wilderness. They are left to fend for themselves, a job they are not particularly good at until they meet up with an Aboriginal teenagish looking young man who takes care of them for a while. While this was not the worst movie we've watched it certainly wasn't my favorite either. Sprinkled throughout the movie were artistic interpretations of the scenes in the form of animal images. For example as the kids were walking there were lots of shots of scary dessert creatures, while the Aborigine was hunting for food so that they could stay alive footage of animals being shot by hunters presumably for sport was spliced throughout the sceene, etc. It was sort of interesting but also a tad slow moving and the bit right before the ending didn't really make much sense to me. Possibly this was meant to be the most clever bit of the whole thing. Also the teenage English girl had some truly annoying moment like when she was try to ask, or really demand water and she just kept saying "we want water, I don't know how I can make it more simple than that" in an increasingly loud voice, as if that was going to make their new found friend suddenly speak English. A quick search online suggests that as with most of the 'cult movies' aka movies-that-only-fanatics-love I've somehow missed the greater artistic point.