I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PAULA SELING & OVI-“Playing with Fire” (2010).

Now this is what I think of as a Eurovision song.  It’s Romania’s entry and it came in third!  The video is a live version (I assume).  And it is deliciously over the top right from the start.  Paula & Ovi face each other while the backing singers punctuate all of the lyrics.

Even the opening beat feels very Euro to me (whatever that means).  But when they start singing at each other, “Girl Girl Girl…” “Boy boy boy…” and they get to the chorus about burning the place down, the theatricality hits its peak.  I really don’t like this song, and yet after listening to it three times for this review, I find it maddeningly infectious.  Just like Eurovision.

And I would be remiss for not acknowledging the outrageous high not she hits in the middle.  I don’t think it’s particularly effective in the song, but it is impressive.

[READ: July 17, 2010] “The Erlking”

This was a fascinating story that went in two very different directions (and which feels like it’s part of a longer story).

There are two characters in the story Ondine–a young girl who only answers to “Ruthie”– and Kate, her mom. As the story opens, Ruthie’s mom is dragging her to the Elves’ Faire at the local Waldorf school.  Her mom feels bad that she never even considered sending Ruthie to the school (they had tried with the Jewish Montessori school, but were not accepted).  SHe had heard a story about a nine year old who knew the entire Mongol empire but still sucked his fingers.  She gets the awesome line: “Everybody has to go into a 7-Eleven at some point in life, operate in the ordinary universe.”

She figures that she can introduce Ruthie to some fun and imaginative things by bringing her here.  As the story continues, we learn a lot about Ruthie’s mother’s concerns and fears of inadequacy (some are common and relatable, some are over the top, and others are pretty unusual).

Ruthie is no fool, however, and she knows how to play her mother to get what she wants.  She learned from experience that plastic toys are out, but if she plays her cards right she may be able to get a few wooden ones at the Faire.  Ruthie also has a bit of a devilish streak in her.  She has to pee, but when she has that “snowflake feeling…regular things like walking or standing are more exciting.”  [This is one of my favorite descriptions in a story in a long time].

Everything goes along as you might expect until Ruthie sees a man down one of the lanes.  Her mom thinks it’s John C. Reilly (which was a very funny and unexpected trip into reality), but Ruthie knows that the man, whoever he is, will bring her whatever she wants.  And that’s what makes me think the story is part of a larger picture. Because this fantasy world of Ruthie’s–an entirely different one than her mother brings her too–is not addressed.  It’s also casually mentioned late in the story that Ruthie is brown (and there are no fairies that look like her, which seems like it would have been an issue earlier).

On the other hand, the ending feels like a solid conclusion to what we’ve seen.   So, I’m not suggesting that the story is incomplete (because it does work as a whole), it just feels like it could have a lot more going on.

The Q& A with Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is available here (and I’m bummed to see that this isn’t part of a longer work).