Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

The last basketball game of the regular season was canceled.

So Julie and I went to see the new Deppirate flick. Better than the second, worse than the first. Keith Richards shows up for a little screen time. Looked just like Keith Richards normally does. It was heroic and sad at times. Solid, overall, but nothing to write home about.

GUILDENSTERN: And a syllogism: One, he has never known anything like it. Two, he has never known anything to write home about. Three, it is nothing to write home about... Home... What's the first thing you remember?

ROSENCRANTZ: Oh, let's see... The first thing that comes into my head, you mean?

GUIL: No -- the first thing that you remember.

ROS: Ah. (Pause.) No, it's no good, it's gone. It was a long time ago.

GUIL (patient but edged): You don't get my meaning. What is my meaning.
What is the first thing after all the things you've forgotten?

ROS: Oh I see. (Pause.) I've forgotten the question.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is such a fantastic play by Tom Stoppard (who was the reason that Shakespeare in Love was actually pretty good and also was a writer for Brazil and Empire of the Sun, which are both good but very different. While Brazil is the superior film, the John Williams score for Empire of the Sun is excellent). The notion of taking two characters who have no depth and delving, in depth, into that exact lack of depth without providing any depth for the characters is very absurd and right up my alley. The beauty is that it is absurd within the context of something (Hamlet) to which we ascribe normalcy due its presence in our literary canon. It soon becomes clear that Hamlet is anything but normal. Oh, if you don't make the obvious connection, read/see Beckett's Waiting for Godot right after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

That reminds me, one of the fantastic things about going to NYU was the proximity to all sorts of fantastic things that didn't exist elsewhere. A prime example of it was a completely unexpected production of Waiting for Godot put on at the Classic Stage Company featuring John Turturro, Tony Shalhoub and Doc, er, I mean Christopher Lloyd. You can check out the NY Times review if you're into that sort of thing, but the fascination that I've always had with that play combined with three actors who I actually recognized playing three of the four roles in the play was incredible. It was a great production by my admittedly limited standards (as I was a college freshman living 3 blocks from the theatre at the time), but more importantly, I was pulled into a different world that I didn't really know existed until that point. Ha! Reminds me of getting pulled into ultimate way back when...

Ouch, I just recognized that horrible pun. My apologies.
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Workout Total:
10 min core workout
20 min stretching