I watched one movie while I was sick. The Shop on Main Street was a black and white Czechoslovakian movie from 1965. The Netflix disc had been sitting on top of my tv for literally months. But the film will stay with me even longer than the disk did. Read More
ByGD
A Song of Hate and Fear
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Odin’s Eye at the Nordic Heritage Museum
From the museum website
The Odin’s Eye exhibit at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle’s oh-so-Scandinavian Ballard neighborhood is part of the annual Taste of Iceland by Iceland Naturally event. It was also the event that launched my Reykjavik staycation in Seattle. Read More
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Holding Back
Last week festival season transitioned to fall arts, and as usual I wanted to see it all. On Wednesday I attended the opening of Seattle’s Decibel Festival (not to be confused with the also-excellent touring metal festival of the same name). On Saturday I brought my daughter to the first Pacific Northwest Ballet repertory of the season, Jewels. I was sad to have missed the Jewels preview at Seattle Public Library earlier in the week.I really wanted to see the Erased Tapes showcase at Decibel on Sunday. I didn’t even try to make it to Your Feast Has Ended before it closed, despite how significant the exhibition at the Frye seems to have been. I love the arts; I love the numerous ways they enrich my life. I had a major epiphany at Bumbershoot last year. It reinforced my enthusiasm for the arts, but it’s also the reason that I missed more events than I attended last week. Read More
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Book Report: Lost in Translation
Lately I’ve been receiving a lot of review copies of novelty books. I wanted to review Crap Taxidermy, a self-explanatory photo book based on a Tumblr, but it depressed me too much. Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World is much more my style, although it too has a Tumblr feel about it, and my feelings on bloggy books are mixed. Unrelated to the movie of the same name, Lost in Translation is a collection of foreign words that have no equivalent in English.
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Pursuing Excellence
As a government employee, succession planning is a common theme at my office; civil service is out of fashion, and we are what in HR circles is termed an “aging workforce.” What this means to me as the staff writer is that I spend a disconcerting amount of time writing death notices for our internal communications. I hate to say it, but we have boilerplate for this sort of thing. Read More