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Thursday, December 13th, 2007
Tonight's family movie was Pippi Longstocking, poorly dubbed into English, a Hannukah gift from Sylvia's aunt Miriam, whose favorite movie it was in her youth. It is a (mostly) beautiful film visually which looks like it was made on a shoestring budget. The colors were enough to blow my mind, and to make me think of the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie. (Also the candy-store scene helped bring that association to mind.) It was hard to tell how well anybody was acting (besides Nilsson, who very obviously stole the show) because of the horrendous dubbing -- I would be trying to focus on an actor's face and see what they were doing when all of a sudden somebody else would start speaking. I haven't watched a dubbed movie in a really long time,* I don't think I've ever noticed this kind of thing before; I wonder whether this particular dubbing is just done really poorly or if this is a common attribute of dubbed films which I have not been perceptive enough to pick up on in the past. Here is a 7-minute clip of Pippi and her friends and her father, from near the end of the movie, in Swedish. One thing I get from that clip that I did not really get from the dubbed movie, is that the girl playing Annika seems to have a real gift for acting -- I see from IMDB that she did not play any other roles after this, which is a shame.
 *Oh wait no, that's wrong; I watched Lamorisse's White Mane not long ago, dubbed into English, and did not have this complaint. But there was also very little dialog in that movie: most of the dubbing was of narration, where it's not a problem in this way.
posted evening of December 13th, 2007: 2 responses
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Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
After I was finished reading to Sylvia the other night, I put down Harriet the Spy thinking, the class differences stuff that seemed so important early in the book has kind of faded. But I don't think it has for Sylvia as she is listening to the story, as witness tonight when Harriet went over to Janie's house and was let in by the maid, Sylvia asks, "So... Harriet and Janie are both rich, right?" And she was very interested in the subsequent scene, where Sport's father is excited about having sold his book.
posted evening of November 28th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, November 24th, 2007
We went to see The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center today, meeting up with our friends from south Jersey who made the trip up, whom we met on our China trip. Most everything about the performance was fun -- being in the lovely New York State Theater, the festive mood, the walk up to the theater featuring really beautiful weather, watching Sylvia and Kimberlee be entranced by the show; but I sort of shook myself midway through the second act and asked, why is this not making any impression on me? Because it was not -- the only thing I could really connect with about the whole show, was watching the girls watch it. I could listen to the instruments and think they sounded very sweet and clear, and watch the dancers and be impressed by their athletic ability; but I got no emotional reaction to it. Does the music have any emotional depth to it? I do not consider myself a good judge of classical music -- but this seemed like fluff to me. Much of it is melodies that I recognize -- from Fantasia, from Muzak, from Sylvia, who is learning "The Nutcracker March" for her orchestra; indeed probably from having seen the whole ballet at some point in the past. Any one of them is pretty on its own. But the melodies just seem like they're strung together without any connecting tissue -- I'm not sure that is my problem with the ballet as a whole but it is one thing that occurred to me while I was watching. I wondered why I wasn't digging the dancing more -- specifically it occurred to me that I had felt really involved in what I was watching, when we went to an acrobatic performance last month, and that the ballet was a similar kind of experience. I guess probably the difference was distance -- the acrobatic troupe was performing in a very small theater, so they were close enough I could really see their faces, whereas the ballerinas just looked like little dolls or something. Update: Some useful information from Ellen, about different versions of the Nutcracker story.
posted evening of November 24th, 2007: 6 responses
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Saturday, November 17th, 2007
Tonight, Sylvia started to pick up on the class thing in Harriet the Spy -- first noticing that Ole Golly is not Harriet's parent, and asking me to explain about nannies; then when Harriet was talking to their cook Sylvia said "They're rich, right?" And that came up again when one of Harriet's classmates was dropped off by a limosine. -- It seems like it's a pretty obviously major feature of the book, and kudos to Sylvia for picking up on it, but I'm wondering a little why my memory of the book would include none of this -- it's all just a fun story of Harriet running around spying on people and then having some trouble when she gets discovered. Was I dense? Hmm...
posted evening of November 17th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, November 16th, 2007
Tonight for bedtime stories, Sylvia and I started on Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh. Looks interesting! -- I read this book, probably twice or three times, when I was 9 or 10 years old; I remember really liking it but not too much about it. For instance I had totally forgotten the class differentials in the book -- perhaps I just didn't understand them as a kid -- but already in the first few pages we are seeing what an important role class will play, as wealthy Harriet is brought out to Far Rockaway to meet her nanny's mother and she and Sport seem totally alien to the situation.
posted evening of November 16th, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, November 4th, 2007
Ooh nice, it's the early morning and the sun is out. Looks like beautiful weather today. I am going to take Sylvia to her swimming class and then this afternoon, the Dragonflies (an FCC spinoff children's group that Ellen and some friends have organized) are coming over to do craft projects.
posted morning of November 4th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
I always have thought of Moominpappa's Memoirs as the least interesting book in the series, worth reading only for the sake of completeness. But I have been reading it to Sylvia, at her request, for the past week or so; and this time around I am getting a fuller picture of it -- it is not just Moominpappa's boastful relation of his exploits, but rather his telling to Moomintroll (and Sniff, and Snufkin). There is a level of irony and distance that I wasn't really noticing before -- what I mean is, it was clear (in my previous reading) that Moominpappa was making a lot of stuff up to make himself look important -- that is an obvious part of the joke that's going on. But I thought that was the whole joke, and it's a kind of limited and corny one. Now I am picking up on the fact that Moominpappa is himself in on the joke and that he's winking at his audience -- this seems much more interesting to me than if it's just Jansson winking at me. Also: Sylvia says of the two Jansson picture books (Moomin, Mymble, and Little My and Who Will Comfort Toffle?) that "one is funny and one is serious", and that she prefers the funny one. (I kind of have to agree, though Toffle is pretty charming too.)
posted evening of October 31st, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
Recently Sylvia has been learning how to play with her second finger in the low position, mostly in the interests of playing songs in the key of G; her orchestra director and I have both been showing her how to play the second octave of the G scale and she's pretty interested in it. Well tonight we were working on "Etude", which I guess is the first song in Suzuki that uses that position, and she was spending a lot of time on getting it to sound right; then she said she wanted to play something for me, and did "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," in A, using a low second finger -- awesome, she just discovered minor keys! So I showed her how to play with a low first finger, and she could do the whole song in A minor.
posted evening of October 24th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, October 10th, 2007
Sylvia is really interested in transposing music. Today we were working on Andantino, she was playing it in in G, D, and A, moving back and forth -- we were only doing the first half of the song, which is all on two strings, so she was able to do this without moving out of first position. It's pretty neat to watch, like she just discovered you could do that -- I think influenced by watching me play violin tunes on the viola -- anyway it seems like it will be a really good way of building her musical ear.
posted evening of October 10th, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, September 30th, 2007
Tonight for bedtime stories, I read the end of De Jong's Along Came a Dog to Sylvia. She noticed there were several blank pages after the last page of text and wanted to know why. Well... I'm not sure, that's just how it always is with chapter books... Sylvia's suggestion: "That way if you don't think the story's over, you can write some more."
posted evening of September 30th, 2007: Respond
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