The Lions of London and a Ferris Wheel

Lately there has been little to write about. One exception is that Papa brought out a videocamera for me to record songs on the piano without the poor sound quality that comes with the digital camera, so he worked out how to operate it for me, and I recorded Schumann's Kinderszenen and the beginning of Album für die Jugend, Mozart's variations on the march from Les mariages samnites, and the first movement of Schubert's Sonata in B flat major. All of these recordings were all right, but not exactly stunning, as far as the way I played goes. One reason is that I haven't played the Kinderszenen in a long while. Anyway, one major benefit of this session was to revive my ambition to improve and to find new pieces. Today, for instance, I played the piano part of the third movement of Beethoven's Archduke Trio again. It is lovely to play it when the piece is still fresh, because I consciously "live through" (to exaggerate a little) the progression of the music, and it isn't so familiar and mechanical yet. Besides, I am playing without the pedal except where indicated, because I tend to overdo the pedal, and because it encourages sloppiness in the way I play individual notes.

Then I am writing more of my England-in-the-time-of-Bloody-Mary story; it really isn't that great, but it is helping me to practice writing dialogue, plot, characterization, etc. It has also revived my interest in Shakespeare, since his phrases continually come to mind and I continually wish I could work them into the story as quotations, so I quickly dipped into The Tempest and The Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure yesterday. It is fortunate that, the older I get, the more alive the plays of Shakespeare become and the better I can understand them. But he is one of the authors whose work I admire more than I like. A large part of it is probably because theatre is demonstrative and deals in more or less primal emotions, and because I am all for being undemonstrative and level-headed.

Aside from that, I watched television, starting with the (what I felt to be) very vague statements of Jean-Claude Trichet, José Manuel Barroso, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Jean-Claude Juncker, at the live press conference about a unified plan to help Europe's banks in the present economic crisis. On the documentary channel there was an exciting film about the Ice Age, which featured visually convincing but conceptually absurd CG scenes to explain the topography of that Age in reference to present-day landmarks. We (J. was in the room, too, to do his Spanish homework) were treated to the sight of a row of curly-roofed Amsterdam houses, the Finchley Road Tube station sign, and Berlin's Sony Centre, embedded in the massive snowy face of a glacier. Then the subject turned to the balmier African climate that graced England in past times, so a living lion ambled past his stone brethren and ascended the Fourth Plinth(!) in the glare of the winking sun, hippopotami basked in the basin of a fountain, and vultures encircled Nelson's Victory Column, in Trafalgar Square.

Despite the fascinating nature of this documentary, I returned to another channel to see the end of Passenger 57, an action thriller with Wesley Snipes. It was amusingly old-fashioned in some ways, and middling in most ways. Executive Decision and other films have covered the ground as well, and mostly better. But the chase scene in the fairground, though not nearly as well-thought-out as it would have been in a Jackie Chan movie, was still pretty good, what with the head of a merry-go-round horse being exploded with bullets and so on. The part that I saw was also refreshingly free of bloody splurge and luridly inventive demises.

Anyway, dawn is breaking and it's time to go to sleep.