I get crap from arts organizations all of the time. It's fun reading for me: like looking at a travel company's brochures and imagining the places I could go. Except, well, it doesn't involve leaving London.

The recent batch had not just the Carlos Acosta and company show at ENO the end of July (eee!), but also this cool thing at the Battersea Arts Centre that I've just bought tickets to "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea:"

Using the aesthetic of silent film, a series of comic vignettes unfold in which the actresses interact seamlessly with antiquated animation accompanied by a charming, often eerie, piano score…

1927 have circumnavigated the globe in search of circus sideshow curiosities and silent films, noir night music and fine flapper dancers... step inside the devil’s mouth and join 1927 plus friends from foreign shores for the most inimitable theatrical event this year!

Along with some other shows I've scheduled tonight, I've booked this one for Saturday, December 6th, while my uncle is here. Tickets were 16 a pop. Anyone else care to join us? (Note that Tuesdays are pay what you can ... so if this sounds good, but you're skint, Tuesdays might be a good plan for you. Show runs through January 3rd.) For some reason it sounds to me like the kind of really cool thing that will sell out before you have a chance to blink ...

I had a great time at the Carlos Acosta show at the Coliseum, even though we had crap overpriced balcony seats. The review is up and I'm calling it a night.

Also, in my Thursday Next novel, as she was rescuing a William Shakespeare clone, she was attacked by a bunch of genetic experiments, followed by an army of cloned Napoleons, only to be saved by an army of, er, Wellingtons. Now she's going to play competition croquet with a team half composed of Neanderthals, and somehow this all makes sense.

Well, thanks to an 8 PM start time, we made Ballet Black at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio. Sadly, the choreography was mostly fair to middlin' and the dancers were .... not impressive. I thought maybe they were just missing things with the first piece because it was new to their repetoire, but later it became clear there was a lot of missing going on - legs not able to go equally high, sloppy handling of partners, a clumsiness on pointe. I know ballet is hard, but tonight I could really see it - and I go to see ballet so I can go "Wow!" not "Ow!"

Still, made it home by 10:30, so at least it was short. Tomorrow is Carlos Acosta at the Coliseum and I am expecting the best from that.

Man, I never caught up with LJ yesterday. I didn't finish reading the new stuff that was there at breakfast, and I didn't read catch up in the evening with the stuff that came in between 5 and 11 PM. And, well, er, it goes without saying that I didn't have time to post after noon (being far too busy chatting with people on a post about poop. Americans, I want your feedback on this one!).

Instead I was 1) working like a starving monkey (actually made my way to organ grinder yesterday, special project from CTO) and 2) living life. Life, you say? Why yes, for last night I went to see Carlos Acosta (sigh) at Sadler's Wells with mabel_morgan, bathtubgin, and a cast of thousands. God, it's amazing to see a dancer who's at the top of his form, especially when "his form" is in practically another universe from other dancers. I really thought the other performers were A quality, too, but, well, when I was grading papers in grad school, every now and then you'd get a paper that was, well, this mini-dissertation that made you want to sit down with the person who wrote it to further probe their views, have a conversation, you know? That's Carlos Acosta. His Corsaire was what the choreographer dreamed of in his head, I just know it.

We got out of Sadler's Wells pretty early, all things considered, and made it back in good time. And yet, still no LJ, because I was chatting with a friend back home and looking for my November BFI calendar (movies of Tsai Ming Liang, hurray) to no avail, and writing (gasp!) email to another friend. What's the world coming to, when I don't have time for the internet?

Right, going to make an egg and bacon sandwich and NOT catch up on LJ again. No idea what we're doing tonight, but I'm sure we'll manage.

I was up too late packing, foolish me, and instead of getting into work early I was heare 10 minutes late. But I'm ready to go to Pisa. I've got two books, a Connie Willis book that I'll probably finish two hours after starting, and a Nick Hornby book I bought used that I will leave behind if I don't like it. Meanwhile, Proust is up to page 958, but since it's so heavy it's not coming with me. (I'm also aggravated because due to the liquid restrictions I just can't get by without checking my luggage; I don't have a 100 ML container of contact lens solution and obviously I can't get by without it and I'm not going to Boots to look for it under.)

Meanwhile, look at this article on Lucca. Mmmm, such food! We will spend all day there Saturday (with the night at our cute hotel in Pisa) and then Sunday in Pisa. But, sights, schmites! We are going to eat like kings! I'm going to make this crazy amount of holiday time we get here WORK for me!

In other news, it's also payday, and for (seemingly) the first time since I've been here I wasn't spending the last three days bringing cold spaghetti to work and trying to figure out how to stretch out the remaining £5 on my Oyster ("If I walk to work in the morning, I can still get to Leicester Square and back afterwards, though I can't stop on the way ..."). I'm still not buying clothes and trying to keep my non-necessary (theater doesn't count!) spending down, but what a relief it is that we could cover our rent and food and utilities and NOT be drawing down our savings for the first time in six months.

( Review of ballet last night: Seven Deadly Sins / Pierrot Lunaire / La Fin du jour. In short, spend the middle in the bar. ) That said, I'm still looking forward to the last mixed rep of the season, and I've already got my tickets bought and waiting.

I expect I'll be offline until Monday. Hope everyone who goes to Whitby has a great time and otherwise see you on the flip side!

Big excitement of the day: we're heading from the Pic to the District line at Earl's Court, and we've kind of gotten behind the crowd in general. We're walking toward the escalators. An elderly couple is a little bit ahead of us, with about two rollie suitcases each. Suddenly, as the flat metal starts to morph into stair steps, the woman, lower down, gets caught up in her suitcases and starts to fall over. Her husband turns to help her, and of course HE then starts falling, and OMIGOD it's like a bad Disney cartoon or a dream where you just keep falling down the steps over and over

only I drop my bag and book and run forward up the stairs and grab the woman as she is spinning around and catch her and keep her from falling any more

and Jason, behind me, rushes to the edge and pushes the button

and the stairs stop and the people are almost upside down and there is luggage all over the place and I'm holding on to an oldish American woman who's scared and startled and getting her readjusted so she's not falling onto me any more

but she seems to be okay. Two other people run up past me to the old man and check in on him (apparently he got a bit of a gouge). My lady sits up and tells me she's been travelling since 10 AM and she's very tired and the luggage just started slipping. I help her get upright. She's fine. Jason (now carrying my stuff) gets a little further ahead to help the man with his heaviest bag; I hold onto the woman's elbow and walk her up the now-stopped escalator. The man turns and looks at us and says,

"Can you get this thing to start again?"

No, I tell him, we all have to walk now, but it's not that far to go. All the people are now helping them up the stairs with their stuff, checking in on them, assuming (incorrectly) we're with them because we're also American. I tell the woman it's better to walk now because she won't lose her balance, but that she'll be fine when she gets to the hotel, and that she should go right to bed. Nobody is pushing or being impatient, everyone is helpful. The old couple is alright.

Ballet was also good, great value at £7.50 considering that the first one (Chroma) blew my mind away (like best ballet in about three years), the second had Carlos Acosta *swoon* and the third had music by Michael Nyman.

It's late. I'm worried that I'll wind up not finishing any books this month because I've been caught up in Remembrance of Things Past, so now I'm trying to finish up some short stories by Connie Willis and feeling a bit embarassed at the fact I'm not savoring them as if they were a box of chocolates. Remembrance is more like a meal, the kind you get served over three days. I did manage a few more pages tonight but I feel like I'm shorting Connie. Oh well, Proust will probably be keeping me company until spring at this rate. And I'm still kind of cooking on adrenaline.

I must have ingested a quart of water last night. My feeling is that if I hadn't, I'd be feeling hung over this morning. (Er, well, this afternoon, as it just rolled into the noon hour.)

Latest re: job: they want me to submit the visa myself. There's some kind of "urgent" thing you can do when you have a job offer. This is all fine except I still have no idea when everything will be ready, and I also need to have a proper visa. I just worry they'll lose interest while I'm dicking around. I really need to get the letter from my boss and the letter from my former coworker. Aaargh. I'll ask the one I've been reliably in contact with if he'll write the letter for me instead. Wait, no, I'll send it back to Jim and then bug Cort.

Last night: xxxlibris and I had a great time at the ballet and a really good visit to boot. Carlos Acosta was a god and he blew my mind when he was dancing Vaganova’s "Diana & Acteon pas de deux " - there was some thing where he twisted in the air like a cat trying to right himself and I was positive that he was simultaneously defying the laws of gravity, human anatomy, and (possibly) space and time. I gasped, I had goosebumps. Wow. And the girl he was dancing with ... was positively ethereal. I felt like I was seeing all of the A-listers on stage at once and I just loved it. How will I spend my mid-year bonus (the one hopefully waiting for me when I get home)? With season tickets to the Royal Ballet. Oh baby.

I've already got my mind on stuff I need to take care of if I only have a month before I leave ... gum surgery ... year's supply of prescriptions ... kayak trip with shadowdaddy ... I have no idea what I would need to move over here or how I would handle things. It's enough to make my mind spin, though, truth be told, I think this is exactly what this little brain of mine is made for.