islanded in a stream of stars

Bernard Herrmann's Taxi Driver is really growing on me; it joins the ranks of the Incredibles, Out of Africa, Dances With Wolves, and Enigma in the category of scores for which I felt lukewarm/bored upon the first listen and discovered how wonderful it was by the second or third listen some time after. It's a hard listen at first; you've got the hard brass progressions, the marching percussion and anguished chromatic dissonances in the main title that are redeemed by the lyrical saxaphone solo (Betsy's theme). It's existential anguish in a nutshell, but what a fascinating story you hear unfurl, how such beauty and harshness sympatically coexist. What's really lovely about Herrmann is how he subtly tweaks these themes in such a way that you're never quite listening to the same piece twice and hear something new each time.

On the non-slacker front, thanks to the 15 minute timer method I finally have a college essay that's 486 words long. And it was painful to get it at that length even while talking about something I love; I always expected to have more difficulty in cutting stuff down, actually. Tomorrow will be a mad editing fest and I will be pretty much done with the essay that I'm using for six out of seven unis; Stanford is the only one that requires me to come up with fresh material, and a lot of it at that.

I'm going to go to bed early tonight for once. I just can't do my French homework.