Happy 4th of July!

Eastern Market is reopening!

I almost missed the event notice when browsing the weekly e-mails I get from the Post, but two years after the main building at Eastern Market was gutted by fire, the market will reopen tomorrow morning at 11:00 am in a ribbon-cutting ceremony!

That bit of news brings a great smile to my face, as Eastern Market is a wonderful venue that I think everyone should visit at least once. And when I first heard of the fire two years ago, it really broke my heart to see the damage to the main building.

In the two years since the fire, a lot of the vendors have been operating either outside or in a temporary building, but now that the main building is reopening and all the vendors are returning home, a staple of DC culture can come back to life again, and a visit to the newly-opened Eastern Market might be in due order. :)

10 Best Picture nominees next year

I got word on IMDb today that, for next year's Oscar ceremony, the Academy has decided to increase the number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten! The rationale given by the Academy president is thus:

"Having 10 Best Picture nominees is going allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize."

If I'm not mistaken, the last time the Best Picture category had more than five nominees was in the '40s. That was the era when landmark films such as Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, and Rebecca beat out numerous other competitors—some of which were landmark films themselves! Think of The Philadelphia Story, Citizen Kane, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, even The Wizard of Oz!

I can see this adding great excitement to the race for Best Picture, because it raises the bar for films with that much more competition. The one question that comes to mind, however, is whether this will ever extend into the other Oscar categories—Best Actor, Best Director, etc.

A brief Twin Peaks reboot?

If IMDb tells me true, actor Kyle MacLachlan is trying to put together an effort to get the TV show Twin Peaks rebooted in a series of five-minutes episodes for internet-only viewing.

Twin Peaks is the brainchild of film director David Lynch, and ran for only two seasons in 1990 and 1991. The show was originally supposed to be a character-driven whodunit revolving around the murder of teen prom queen Laura Palmer, with FBI agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan, at the time one of Lynch's leading men) heading up the investigation. I say "originally" because about halfway through the series, the murder mystery was solved at the demands of the studio, and the show had to quickly redirect itself and find a new premise upon which to continue. Luckily it found one—the Black Lodge, a spiritual realm that can only be likened to Hell, which was accessible in the woods surrounding the town of Twin Peaks.

Rumors about resurrecting the show have been ongoing since the show's cancellation in 1991, and it doesn't help that the series finale had way too many cliffhangers for the average Twin Peaks fan to sleep well at night. It's already been argued that the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was David Lynch's attempt to bring the show to a semi-conclusion, but the storylines were still open-ended enough that the idea of bringing the show back to life was plausible. I'm pretty sure that Lynch has stated already that he has little interest in bringing the show back (most likely because too much time has passed), but apparently audience demand was enough to convince Kyle MacLachlan.

If he ends up pulling the production off, I wouldn't mind seeing it, if only to see where he takes the series. If it's only five-minute episodes, I can't imagine it would be more than quick vignettes that suggest what's happening on the show.

Beautiful music (X)

I seem to have opened the floodgates with Rachmaninoff, because after posting about his 10 Preludes, Op. 23, I now feel the urge to continue with the 13 Preludes, Op. 32. As before, all are performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy.

And for my money, I have yet to find anyone who can bring out the great Russian pathos of No. 10 like Ashkenazy does.

No. 1 in C major

No. 2 in B flat minor

No. 3 in E major

No. 4 in E minor

No. 5 in G major

No. 6 in F minor

No. 7 in F major

No. 8 in A minor

No. 9 in A major

No. 10 in B minor

No. 11 in B major

No. 12 in G sharp minor

No. 13 in D flat major

Beautiful music (IX)

Rachmaninoff is one of my favorite composers. His music is so ambitious, so enormous in size, so epic in passion that it's hard for me to not get up in the vortex. I especially love his piano music. His Third Piano Concerto is something truly to behold, and I've been lucky enough to see it performed live twice. On a smaller scale, though, his Preludes are also a marvelous achievement.

Rachmaninoff wrote two sets of Preludes in his lifetime: the 10 Preludes, Op. 23; the 13 Preludes, Op. 32; and of course, the ever famous Prelude in C sharp minor, Op. 3 No. 2. For today's enjoyment, I'm posting the 10 Preludes, Op. 23, as performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy (with the exception of No. 5; that one's performed by Sviatoslav Richter; I really wanted to find the performance by Van Cliburn, but alas, YouTube couldn't accommodate).

No. 1 in F sharp minor

No. 2 in B flat major

No. 3 in D minor

No. 4 in D major

No. 5 in G minor

No. 6 in E flat major

No. 7 in C minor

No. 8 in A flat major

No. 9 in E flat minor

No. 10 in G flat major

Happy birthday, Colby!