mariness

I first saw glassblowers in Venice.

In my memories, it's also the first time I saw magic.

The men put sticks into hot fire, drawing out something that was red and gleaming and – it seemed – liquid fire. And then, from that, they would start to pull at the fire, twisting, pulling. Other colors would emerge and then – this was the magic – a little horse would come out. Or a flower. Or a shoe. Or a vase. Once the glassblowers snipped off little pieces of purple glass, all glittering, and gave one piece to my brother and another piece to me. I still have mine. And I still have the horse I was allowed to get – green, since green was my favorite color that day (it changes, but is never orange). Only one horse, not more, because my parents were afraid that I would break the others, a prophecy that alas proved all too true: that horse is in my room right now, in the shelves across from me, with one foot missing, to remind me of magic. And breaking things.

It's not really a surprise, I guess, that I fell in love with glass blowing and glass art and can spend hours sitting in front of glassworkers and that even hours spent in front of stained glass cathedral windows listening to extraordinarily dull and frequently factually incorrect lectures on tympanums couldn't quite destroy this love (although it made me considerably less fond of Romanesque architecture, but that's another saga.) I want to do that, I found myself thinking.

I remembered, too, the little "stained glass" kits I had when I was a kid – when you had a metal frame, and you dropped little colored balls in it, and put it into the oven, and, yay! Stained glass. Of a sort. That had been fun and worth doing again, even if not precisely a high level of creativity.

So, when our town catalog flopped into our mailbox, coincidentally while I was trying to think of ways to get myself out of the house and doing something new and meeting more people, offering a glass art class, I had to sign up. I didn't quite tingle with excitement, but my mind thought of all of the happy things I could do with glass. The term, I realized, was rather vague. Would we be making stained glass? Glass jewelry? Glass art pieces? Or – realizing how unlikely this was for an introductory glass art glass in a community center in a small city that has not exactly shed a small town feel – would we actually be doing glass blowing?

As always, reality rather rudely intruded into these lovely ideas. Along, of course, with hurricanes. Potential ones, that is.

( Cut for fakery, adhesive, length and green dolphins. Sorry about the dolphin part. )

So, as I mentioned, yesterday my parents and I headed off to see Oceans, a French film brought to the U.S. by Disney with revised narration by Pierce Brosnan. I have no idea if the English narration is the same as the French.

First, let me mention the good parts: the photography is stunning, with particularly vivid pictures of crab armies (the highlight of the film), a blanket octopus, a ribbon eel, a blue whale, and some cute little baby turtles getting eaten by hungry birds (this film is probably not suitable for very small children, whatever the G rating.) It looks glorious. I wanted to take several of the images and turn them into screensavers. And I adored all of the bits about the sea lions. (I love sea lions, and these were particularly adorable sea lions.)

But it is not without its problems, some from the editing, some from the narration, and some stemming from the sad truth that I have spent way, way too much time in my life staring at dolphin noses.

1. Presumably to emphasize its overall "all of the oceans are connected" viewpoint, the movie jumps around and around and around the oceans, and I do mean all of the oceans, with little to no identification; if you didn't know better, you could easily believe that the cute little sea otters just off of Monterey Bay are in fact swimming over the coral reef that the film showed just moments earlier.

This continues to happen through the film, giving little to no context for most of what is going on. We have a shot of what was probably an Atlantic barrier reef almost immediately followed by kelp forests presumably in the Pacific (difficult to tell) switching to Japanese waters and so on.

2. Speaking of editing issues...those dolphins.

The film has quite a few scenes of jumping and swimming dolphins. In all of these scenes, we are meant to think that the film crew just happened to manage to get images of the same dolphins, first under the water and then over the water and then in the afternoon and then in the sunset. Except for one major problem: the shots are of different dolphin species. (If you see the film, watch the noses.) In the most egregious example, the underwater and initial swimming shots are of either Pacific or Atlantic white-sided dolphins, which then through the magic of movie editing become spinner dolphins.

I get that this is going to be lost on the vast majority of viewers. I also get that different dolphin species, less interested than we are in these sorts of distinctions, often swim together, and if I'm not mistaken there was also a shot of some spotted dolphins swimming along with bottlenose dolphins, demonstrating just that point. But combined with the constant shifting from ocean to ocean made me not want to trust the film.

3. If I see an ocean area solely filled with medusae (jellyfish/jellies, whichever term you prefer) and absolutely no other fish, my first thought, Disney, is not, ooooooh, what an exquisite pristine ocean environment, but rather, holy )(*)(, what an overfished area.

The numbers of ctenophores and jellyfish do appear to be increasing in ocean waters. This is not necessarily something to celebrate, since their numbers appear to be increasing just as fisheries are collapsing. It is probable, if not proven, that they are taking advantage of the reduced competition for food.

I suspect magnifelyn had other concerns.

But these quibbles aside, I did find myself loving the film – largely because so much of it really looked cool. Oh, and the sea lions. And the otters. And the blue whales.

*******

We also took a moment to watch – not go up in – Disney's Big Balloon Thing at Downtown Disney, which is a big balloon featuring Mary Poppins which goes up a few hundred feet, hovers there for a bit, and then comes down – all for the low, low price of...$18?

As far as we could tell, the entire Balloon Thing lasts for about five to ten minutes, which, well, great, but given that in the same location you can take in a movie for $7.50 to $10.50 (depending when you get there) or spend several hours at the considerably more exciting Disney Quest at $35 to $41, or (in the evenings/weekends) listen to free sidewalk entertainment, I have to wonder just how well the Balloon is doing. It certainly wasn't attracting many people when we were there, although, granted, we were there during a largely unbusy weekday afternoon.

Also, my mother figured out how to work her moving sand picture thing, which had failed in its potential awesomeness by not actually, as it happened, moving. As it turns out, like so many artistic things, the sand pictures are…dare I say it? A bit temperamental, requiring just the touch of fiddling and kindly if slightly irritated tapping to get moving. I can sympathize.