So, there have been endless articles about how most Halloween costumes for ladies exist on a sliding scale of sleaze, with values from from Stripper to Really Stripper.

However, since I believe you don’t have to go naked this Halloween, I hit Target and looked for some decent costumes. There had to be some, right?

First, I found this, which baffled me then, and baffles me more the more I think about it. It’s part of a series called “Sinners” based on the Seven Deadly Sins (how ATNM of you!). This is Sloth.

I would have assumed that lazy people would be wearing much baggier pajamas and be a lot less toned, but I don’t want to be sloth-ist. Instead, I’ll just wonder how a slothful person can exert themselves to the point that they pull a Hulk and bust out of the front of their PJ pants.

Also, would a slothful person take the time to lace up the corset sides of their pajama top?

Also, seriously, what?

Sadly, since it covers more than eight square inches, it counts. For something.

To be fair, they aren’t all disasters. This is the cutest of the covers-more-than-your-nethers costumes, and a pretty decent approximation of the ST:OS uniform first season. (Well, right up until they started shrinking in the wash and cast members were carefully edging along the walls or fighting interstellar crime as gingerly as possible so they didn’t flash anyone.)

Looking for something a little more regal? How about THE WORLD’S UGLIEST QUEEN COSTUME?

I could point out the random skirt-bodice not-matching, or the collar that looks like an enormous version of a veggie steamer, but really, the model’s face says it all.

In fact, you know what? There’s no way to win with a store-bought costume. Either you make it yourself, or you slap on a tee shirt and go in this:

…good luck driving!

This weekend, Radio City Music Hall hosted The Fellowship of the Ring in Concert. This collaboration among composer Howard Shore, the 21st Century Orchestra, The Collegiate Chorale, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus was designed to bring the magic and grandeur of the film score to life by playing it (literally and aurally) beneath an IMAX-size screening of the film.

That any film score should get a space at Radio City Music Hall is a sign that Shore’s Lord of the Rings is widely considered a masterpiece of the genre, so well-composed it has transcended the usual “It’s only movie music” classification. Four years in the making, the score has garnered Shore three Grammys, a Golden Globe, and two Academy Awards, and has made a highly successful world tour as a stand-alone symphony. The technique, artistry, and passion in the work has made Shore as close to a household name as film-score composers ever get.

This meant that the Hall was packed with hardcore fans, and they knew what they wanted.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be the music.

I attended the Lord of the Rings Symphony when it came to Seattle in 2004, and it was one of the best orchestral performances I’ve ever attended. The score, separated into two movements for each film, pulled from the theatrical and extended editions, with additional orchestrations by Shore that helped tie the work together without the visual cues the movie provides. (The symphony was accompanied by a slide-show of conceptual art to help guide the listener through the trilogy without distracting from the music.) It was an electric experience; the audience seemed to be holding its breath throughout. It was operatic in its scope, and painfully beautiful, and for me at least, the score now stands apart from the movie as a separate, and sometimes more successful, work than the movies it accompanied.

Unfortunately, those who hoped for a similar effect from the concert probably didn’t get it.

The score as it was performed this weekend, while masterfully played and sung (and probably more than worth paying to see by itself), came in second to the film. The dialogue and sound effects were cranked up to 11, and often those audio tracks swallowed up the more delicate cues entirely. (Apparently Saturday’s concert had an additional 60 or so chorus members, which might have made the sound that night a little more robust, but against the Balrog sound effects not much can hold up.)

As a die-hard fan of the score I was anticipating this event immensely, and even after the initial disappointment at the volume of the movie I hoped for the best, but after seeing the event I’m not even sure what the intent was, since the concert as played seemed purely to supply the missing audio track, and ultimately did no justice to the complexity and technical prowess of Shore’s musical.

(Nerd complaint: why did they go to all the trouble of arranging such a large-scale symphonic event and then only screen the theatrical edition? Wouldn’t it have been more powerful to at least play along to the extended edition, offering orchestration that some attendees might not have heard? The chorus was beautifully expressive, and I particularly regretted not getting to hear The Passage of the Elves from such a skilled group.)

The audience, however, didn’t seem to notice anything lacking. In fact, they didn’t seem to notice the music much at all; there was occasional applause after a particularly stirring segment, but there was also applause every time Orlando Bloom spoke, Viggo Mortensen held a sword, a fight scene concluded, or Gimli spoke. The applause drowned out the musicians as often as the sound effects did.

(The biggest applause of the night did not go to conductor Ludwig Wicki, nor to Shore himself, but to Elijah Wood and Billy Boyd, who had attended the concert and were brought out onstage during the curtain call to deafening cheers. Wood and Boyd looked suitably abashed, and applauded at Shore themselves.)

Make no mistake, the night was hardly a disaster. The orchestra was beautiful, the chorus moving, and I’m planning to buy tickets for next year’s show because I enjoy hearing the score performed live in almost any circumstances. I just hope that next year’s circumstances, from audio levels to audience levels, are better.

[This piece originally appeared at Tor.com.]

For someone who was only ever a casual fan of the Lord of the Rings books, I am a nerd and a half for the movies. I have been to every midnight show. (I brought MY MOM to every midnight show. Step back!) Those evenings were some of the coldest ever (movie theatres really don’t want to let Lord of the Rings people in, for some reason), but I remember each one being a blast, for several reasons.

It’s a time machine into my past! The movies were different, my love of midnight shows was the same.
Continue reading

…man, those titles make things redundant. Anyway, Charles Tan was nice enough to interview me:

As a writer, what was the biggest hurdle you had to overcome before getting published?

I think the biggest hurdle for a lot of writers is that vaguely-Victorian perishing-rose hand-wringing fear that they will be rejected and their beloved muse will die and we’ll have to call off the cotillion. Then eventually you get over yourself and rejections just become a note in the story’s file. I tell this story from experience.

Read the rest over at Bibliophile Stalker!