Palace druthers — Beethoven's "Neinth" — Paper late — Are you ready for Izzfest 2006?!

I.
BEST IDEA EVER: Guest blogging!

Many thanks to Hua for an amazing week of posts! Catch up with him at his regular home, the pleasuredome known as the "Palace of Electricity," for his agreeable blend of audiovisual mayhem.

I'm enjoying this guest-blogging thing so much that I want to schedule a month of guest bloggers.
A year?


II.
Thanks to Dizzyhead Dennis for the press release of the week:

COPYING BEETHOVEN - opens October 13th in top tier markets
[...]
Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger) is a 23-year-old aspiring composer studying at the
music conservatory in the world's music capital, Vienna. Her great love of
music gives Anna the courage and confidence in her own talent to pursue a
career as a composer in a time when it was virtually unheard of for women.
She is recommended for a position at a venerated publisher, and, in a
fortuitous turn of events, orchestrates an opportunity to work beside the
greatest, most mercurial composer alive - Ludwig van Beethoven (Ed Harris).

Beethoven is skeptical about Anna's abilities at first but, when he issues
an impromptu challenge, Anna demonstrates her competence and musical
insight. The maestro accepts Anna as his copyist, beginning a relationship
that will transform both of their lives. [...]

I stopped reading at "Ludwig van Beethoven (Ed Harris)." (Below: cover art for Camper Van Beethoven's classic Telephone Free Landslide Victory, perhaps my favorite album title ever. Over at Termite Art, a discussion of bad vs. good movie titles.)





III.
Speaking of movies that I'm in no rush to see, here's the description of Paper Dolls:

Throughout the world, struggling people cross borders illegally to find work and make a better life for themselves: Mexicans in the US, Turks in Germany and North Africans in France. But only Israel has a population of illegal Filipinos of indeterminate gender who care for the elderly Orthodox – and for whom they often become substitute children. PAPER DOLLS follows five such men, refugees from families that reject them, who’ve made a home in Tel Aviv, Israel’s most swinging city. Fast friends, they spend their free time on stage, as the drag queen ensemble, Paper Dolls. [...]

I stopped reading at "illegal Filipinos of indeterminate gender."

IV. Next up: Guest blogger Izzy Grinspan! The Izz was instrumental in getting Jewsrock up and running, and has written on everything from Arkansan author Donald Harington to the pleasures of this hot new musical whatsit called the "iPod."

UPDATE: Breakfast of Champions: Over at Return of the Reluctant, the new "Bat Segundo" show features an interview with David Mitchell, in which he's asked about my Voice review of Black Swan Green (alas, it doesn't sound like he's read it) . . . For those of you keeping score, the name of the Bat Segundo show comes from Mitchell's very fine novel Ghostwritten (unless that's a reference to something else as well!).