Danny Elfman's Music From the Films of Tim Burton

Hello, hello, long time no see etc etc I'm bad at blogging, as usual.
A long time ago (maybe July?), in a city far, far away (from England) Nick and I went to a concert in Seoul.

It was a celebration of Danny Elfman's music from all of Tim Burton's films, played live by an orchestra! A little bit different from our usual musical fare.

As far as I can remember, I'd never been to an orchestral concert, so this was quite exciting. We weren't sat particularly close to the stage, so although the usual ban on photos didn't seem to be present, there wasn't really anything to photograph, so excuse the lack of images. But I suppose you don't go to something like this to take pictures, so what were we expecting?

I'm not totally sure if there was any particular order to the movies that they played, but each section would begin with the movie title displayed on the projector screens. The orchestra would begin playing, and the screens would play some appropriate footage, occasionally broken up with concept art images.

It was really great to see and hear all of the music live, and in particular Danny Elfman himself came out for The Nightmare Before Christmas to perform some of Jack's songs.

I'm a little confused as to why it wasn't in one of Seoul's actual concert halls, as the sound wasn't as great as I was expecting. The orchestra were obviously performing very well, you could hear that. But I wanted to feel the musical vibrations in my chest and have the sound really all around me, rather than just amplified through speakers somewhere in front of me.

Having said that, I still had a great time and it was very cute seeing people leaving afterwards, humming their favourite songs. I'd definitely go to see another concert like this...but maybe not at this venue.

Culture Class | Fish and Freedom

So this week (ish, I'm behind, good start) has been dedicated to superheroes and fish. I'd mentioned to Nick a while ago that I do actually want to read Wonder Woman at some point so he went and got me the books for the current New 52 series, which has pretty pictures and scantily clad gods and goddesses. Cool.

Also, to my shame, we're continuing with our "Why do you like Avengers so much, the individual films are so much better" education. Having finished Captain America and Thor, we moved onto Winter Soldier this week.

I'm loving Wonder Woman. It's just the right amount of creepy and gory and superhero-y, and the designs are all weird and cool enough that I actually drew some fanart. So you know it's good by my book.

Captain America was pretty good, a nice balance of funny and "omg nooooo!", although the shine was taken off when a car chase/accident sent me into a panic after the slightly traumatic events witnessed in the summer vacation. [I'm not going into detail about that anywhere. I'll just say it was scary to see, and "road users on small vehicles, use your goddamn crash helmet and pads".]

Today's food is fish. Just fish. We decided to branch out and buy a fillet of what we thought was mackerel. I like mackerel. I don't think it was mackerel. There were a lot of bones...even on the outside?

But if you can get something a little bit more similar to mackerel, I just heated a pan with some oil in it, threw in some chopped onions and garlic, maybe a tablespoon full of soy, and fried it until they were nice and soft (can't tell about browning because of the soy).

Then I put the chunks of fish in, salted on both sides, skin side up. Not too hot, because I don't want things to stick and burn, but not too cool because I need this to cook quickly, haha.

Fish cooks quickly anyway, which is why it's good, so after a minute or so, if the colour of the meat has changed a bit fairly deep into the middle, I flipped it and turned up the heat to crisp the skin. Overall, I was cooking for about 25 mins, and the fish was in there for all of 10-15.

We just served it up with rice because, again, we're lazy ;p

Not many photos bc there wasn't much way I could make a pile of pan fried fish in a ricebowl look good. And nobody wants to see raw fish with bones everywhere. I've got a few more posts from vacation to do, so I'll get on that!