I Think my Head Imploded

I was surfing Yahoo Answers mere minutes ago when I stumbled upon a question:



Phantom of the Opera - Sequel?

It was recently confirmed by Andrew Lloyd Weber that a sequel to Phantom of the Opera (stage) will be opening at the end of 2009. It's called "Phantom: Love Never Dies". What do you think ?



Oh God...........I think my brain stopped working for a second.

Andrew Lloyd Weber, are you out of your freaking mind?!?! You want to make a sequel to the most successful Broadway musical in a world where statistics clearly show sequels are always epic failures (excluding series that were intended to have sequels, like Lord of the Rings). But now ALW wants to make a sequel to a musical...what? It's a musical, haven't you learned from High School Musical 2?!

And to make it worse, ALW is basing this musical on yet another novel. Now, thanks to my Phantom of the Opera obsessed days about five years ago, I know there are numerous novels based on ALW and Gaston's (original author) Phantom of the Opera. But ALW just had to choose the worst one of them all, "The Phantom of Manhattan." With a boring storyline, unrecognizable characters, and epic fail ending it is the worst book I have ever read. It takes place in New York on Coney Island which immediately makes me think of hot dogs.

Phantom and hot dogs don't mix.

Yeah, I know Coney Island was actually the rich part of NYC, but that's besides the point.

How can you make a hit musical based on a novel whose only connections to the original novel are the names and occupations of the characters?! And on YouTube, there's a video of those cast as Christine and Phantom singing; I've heard better but I think there are more problems than the cast:

"The principal characters of The Phantom of the Opera continue their stories in a breathtaking new musical... Andrew Lloyd Webber's LOVE NEVER DIES.

It is 1907. Ten years after the mysterious disappearance of The Phantom from the Paris Opera House, Christine Daae accepts an offer to come to America and perform at the fabulous new playground for the rich - Coney Island.

Arriving in New York with her husband Raoul and their son Gustave, Christine soon discovers the identity of the anonymous impresario who has lured her from France to sing.

Graced with stunning designs, passionate lyrics and a magnificent score, this brand-new musical is a rollercoaster ride of obsession and intrigue...in which music and memory can play cruel tricks... and The Phantom sets out to prove that, indeed, LOVE NEVER DIES."

Yes, the Phantom will stalk Christine to prove that, indeed, LOVE NEVER DIES DAMNIT!!! Because hey, that plot worked out for ALW in the original Phantom, maybe it will work for his sequel as well. I give a 15% success rate, 85% of leaving ALW in ruin. And feel free to taunt me if this turns out to be another hit, I shall be taunting myself as well.

Embracing my Inner Geek

Well, I haven't updated for awhile and I really don't know what to post so here's something entirely random.

This summer I learned how to solve a Rubik's Cube

Told you it was random.

Basically, everyone in my architecture section at BSU learned how to solve a Rubik's Cube this year thanks to one guy who was obsessed with them (he got a tattoo of a Rubik's Cube on his butt--no joke). Sadly, the school year came to an end and I only learned how to solve a Rubik's Cube halfway :( So, I made a small project of finishing what I started.

It was kind of sad after I memorized how to solve it. I mean, at first I was proud but this great unknown of how to solve a Rubik's Cube was not there anymore. It's actually really simple if you know how to do it so all the hype of how difficult solving it is not true.

I actually learned it within the first week of summer so this is way overdue, but yeah. It passes the time while my computer is acting crappy and I'm waiting for it to act normal.

Here is proof (in double time):




Thanks to Nate for telling me to blog about how I solved a Rubik's Cube haha

My Current Obsession

So, I've noticed this past semester that I have been having these weird obsessions and I've decided to blog every now and then about them, or whatnot. We'll see how long this will last...

Currently, it is Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35. and Wieniawksi's Violin Concerto No. 2. Weird, I know, but yeah. Here are the best 2 movements:

1st Movement, 1st concerto: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFaq9kTlcaY
Don't judge by the first minute or so, I don't really like the beginning. I actually don't really start enjoying the movement until about 2 minutes into it. If anything, just listen to the end of it, maybe last 3 minutes.

3rd Movement, 2nd concerto: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6HVWRXI3X0
Not my favorite recording, I like the one with Joshua Bell better, but I couldn't find him on youtube.

Wieniawksi's concerto is what one of the concerto winners at Interlochen played so it's pretty important to me. See what I had to compete with at Interlochen? I was happy with anything but the last chair haha.

And, by the way, this is what I am working on now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QlyMNMLlfI

I'm pretty good with the first half and it slowly starts declining from there haha. I haven't even touched the candeza yet, which starts at 6:15. The candeza is basically the violinst doing improv and showing off his/her skills. Some of them have written down their candeza's, so that is what students learn off of and if they are famous enough, they make their own candeza (aka, Joshua Bell). So that's why it's all flashy without the orchestra playing in the background. The candeza she is playing is the one I will be learning.

Back to homework, I've been putting off drawing my "journey" for about 2 hours now, should start working on that =P

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Probably since the first book I've read, there has been a theme or moral to the story that I could somehow incorporate into my everyday life. Naturally, as I read more books, aged, became more intelligent, the message in these novels increased in complexity. Now, this was all nice and I understood some of it and am still confused by others, but I never felt a strong urge to change my life or look at life a different way.

My Honors 199 class kind of did that. It was basically a class on existentialism and my professor had a very open teaching style where it was based on student discussion or whatnot. Kind of life Mr. Jankowski's American Lit II class if you had him. Most existentialism philosophers that we read believed life to be devoid of meaning with no God, purpose, or a reason to live. As you may guess, this was slightly depressing--your life is a lie, it's all for nothing. In the end that could be all true if the whole afterlife/heaven turns out to be false, but wouldn't our impact on other human beings impact others, creating a never-ending line where we all influence each other by our actions, no matter how small? I'm still not sure about this, and am just rambling really, but that isn't why I brought that class up. My point is, it made me think more on a religious, belief, basis but I have never been truly interesting in that anyway so it did not greatly impact my life.

And then I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. I have no clue why this novel, out of the other influential, meaningful ones I have read, impacted me so much. Fuck, Catcher in the Rye, the novel for young adults read to "come of age" did nothing for me. Nothing. And then here comes Wallflower (I'll just say that from now on instead of the whole name). It wasn't even written very well, just a simple diary-entry form by a "freshman" in high school. Grammar mistakes, run-ons, random tangents; compared to Catcher in the Rye, it's not written well at all. But for some reason it impacted me more. I had tears in my eyes during the last ten pages, what the fuck?!?

So I bet you are wondering what is so fucking amazing about this book and I don't even fully know the answer. For some reason, this made me really see life and allow me to see flaws in myself and fix the flaws that is preventing me to become who I really am. Honesty is a huge 'theme' towards in the end. In order to be honest with yourself, you have to be honest with others. You can't be afraid to tell someone your feelings because that person may not like you- you should want people to like you based on who you really are and not what you want others to think you are. And I'm not sure I have been fully myself around others...hopefully nothing major, but little things like opinions or whatnot.

And then Wallflower discusses how our personalities are developed--are they given to us through God or our genetics, never to be altered? Or, can we take control of who we truly are? There's arguments for both sides, an answer was never given. But it did talk about how we cannot blame others for what we truly are. A whole massive blaming-line will form with each person's fault in their personality by another and so on and so forth.

Basically, a light bulb turned on. I finished the novel last night and I have already analyzed novels, movies, musicals. I listen to the musical Jekyll and Hyde today and thought about our personal good and evils and mine and societies and if evil is really bad and if good is the right way to go. I have listen to that music since the summer of 2006 and for some reason, despite listening to the soundtrack numerous times, it just clicked in my head after I read the book. And it wasn't even some great discovery. Here's some of the lyrics:

How do you tell evil from good?

Evil does well - good not so good!

Evil's the one that is free everywhere -Good is the one that they sell!

You must decide which is heaven -Which is hell!

It is right there in the lyrics and I only really understand what it is saying now. Daammmnn. And I'm pretty sure this isn't a one time deal. Earlier tonight, I saw the movie Clockwork Orange which questions ethics and what is ethic to society and whatnot and I started to think about it more than usual. The movie ended at 8:30 and if The Office didn't start at 9:00, I would still be thinking about it haha.

But it's just so weird. Everything makes more sense now and I can actually relate to it thanks to that one novel.

Anyway, I just needed to write this all out, put it down with words or whatnot. I finally started on the whole 'finding yourself' journey people take through college and it's pretty cool, and confusing. Sorry about the language, if been reading a ton of J.D. Salinger for a class and if you know anything about his writing, he swears a lot. I leave with a few (but not all) the quotes that brought on this whole process, all said by the wonderful Sam:

"Charlie, don't you get it? I can't feel that. It's sweet and everything, but it's like you're not even there sometimes. It's great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn't need a shoulder. What if they need the arms or something like that? You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things."

“Like take their hands when the slow song comes up for a change. Or be the one who asks someone for a date. Or tell people what you need. Or what you want."

"If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don't want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it too. I want them to be able to do whatever they want around me.”