I was able to watch The Nutcracker today in the library, and I remember from the various other times in my life when I saw the ballet, I loved it, and it was sort of a Christmas tradition for a few years. However, at least for the version I saw, I really didn't like it. It was sappy and insipid, overly sweet and gaudy like watching It's a Wonderful Life while listening to Pat Boone singing Christmas songs, and reading a bunch of Hallmark cards.

I remember last summer, I was in Paris, and I went to the Pompidou Center, a very odd building with infrastructure on the outside, painted in bright colors. There, I saw an exhibit on Kandinsky, which I liked a lot (and mentioned in my photography paper for this class). A couple of months later, back in New York City, I started to see advertisements for the same exhibit at the Guggenheim museum. I have been debating with myself on whether I should see the same exhibit again.

I hardly ever go to Carnegie Hall (though I'm not sure why) so seeing anything there is a real treat, especially when it's free for us. The only other time I remember going to Carnegie Hall was a couple years ago to see a recital of some young music students.

I went to see an opera at the Metropolitan Opera House yesterday, and while at the time at the opera, I looked over the architecture. The architecture is the perfect example of late 60s modernism, when the movement, in my opinion, was declining. The exterior of the opera house is a stone gray cube with some arches but not much else, which was the element that modernism strived for. Inside are concrete curving stairways covered in red carpeting, but not only were the floors carpeted but the walls were carpeted.

I am going to go right out and say this, I did not like the Joseph O'Connor reading. Part of this is because I have a hard time sitting still for long periods of time, though there were other reasons too. His voice, though I heard some people praising it, was melancholy and dull, and it didn't really catch my attention much. Also, the excerpts he read were a bit too long as well. Though he was kind enough to tell us how long each excerpt was, the excerpts were still quite long, according to him, each about eight minutes long.