Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
So I've burned all of Kristin's CDs and I'm about to start burning mine. I got rid of those quarrelsome spaces at the end of songs and, since that left me with a bit of room, I added a few more. I'll be uploading them to my server (whose password changed today, by the way -- find me online for the new one, or, if you're especially clever, know that it's the properly capitalized name of a man who told people how to read a book and once gave a lecture holding an ice cream cone and had a bastard son who grew up into a prince, with a single enthusiastic exclamation mark at the end of it) shortly, so people with my fuznukkited first edition CD can supplement themselves. Trust me, it'll be worth millions someday. The new tracks are:
The Leitmotif of Fafner (and Fasolt, but who cares about him?) from Das Rheingold Triplets, from Between the Devil, sung by John Lithgow
Opera Singer, Cake (I know pretty much all of you have heard it, and most of you probably even own it, but it's my theme song, so :`P~ )
I Have A Gentil Cock, Anonymous, 15th Century (cutest dirty poem ever!!)
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02:13:58 AM,Tuesday 5 November 2002
Hum me! Hum us! Us all hum for hum-mus!
Girly girls go through a lot more toilet paper than I do.
A hundred bajillion pomegranate seeds do not equal one square meal.
And other thinklings of the banausic variety.
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(5)
04:19:56 AM,Monday 4 November 2002
"Appleworks can bite my ass wearing leftover halloween vampire teeth. it may say that it can translate files into word. that it may say. but it liiiiiiiiies. tissue upon tissue of paper-thin lie, building to a massive wad of Lie. a lie-wad. if you could make falsehoods into phyllo dough, appleworks five would produce the world's biggest baklava of lies, dripping wretchedly with false-tongued honey."
Anne rules unbearably.
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(1)
11:47:08 PM,Sunday 3 November 2002
Alfred Einstein said that Idomeneo was "one of those works that even a genius of the highest rank like Mozart could write only once in his life."
It was extraordinary.
I have the DVD with Pavarotti, Cotrubas, Von Stade, and Behrens, and it's amazing. They're four of the best singers I know, and they performed it willingly. But I went to see the same production (by Jean-Pierre Ponelle) -- which means that the set, costumes, and general artistic presentation of the thing were all the same -- at the Washington Opera last night. The only famous one was Placido Domingo, in the title role. The rest of them were quite young; I'd certainly never heard of them. But... ohhh...
I don't know whether I should talk about the whole evening or give my review of the opera itself or anything. I could just sit here gibbering trying to remember every incredible freaking second of last night, but that wouldn't translate to much good bloggage. I dunno. I'll tell it sequentially, I guess. I got gussied up in my good blue suit and took the bus down to Baltimore, the greyhound over to D.C., walked to the metro, took it to Foggy Bottom, and walked over to the Kennedy Center, getting a hot dog with chili, cheese, mustard, ketchup, and saurkraut for $1.20 along the way. Score.
I still had about four hours 'til the opera, so I hung out in the gift store and read Maurice Sendak and a boring biography of Mozart and played on the escalators and drank brazenly from my hip flask hoping to be told off by a security guard (didn't work) and finally went up to the top floor cafe thing to get some lox and cream cheese on rye, cassis bavarian, and fizzy lemonade. Yum.
Then I went back down and watched this world music (Flamenco-Indian-Japanese-African fusion... kinda cool) group set up for a free concert. I tried to pull myself together and write at least some notes for my novel, but I was too jumpy and excited. I sat down on the couch next to a very... striking woman. She had close-cropped grey hair, a noble profile, dancing eyes, strong hands, broad shoulders, firm bosom, a dinner jacket, a blue and green scarf, and wore sheer black stockings in her comfortable shoes. Shazow. We got to talking. She was from Hanover. Her name was Beata. She spent half the year working (as a doctor!) and the other half following Placido Domingo around the globe and going to all his operas. She was gonna see Idomeneo three times this week. She'd been to Bayreuth. She used to play the organ. Her favorite opera was Othello. She was charming, witty, spoke in the most tantalizing low rumbly murmuring voice... in a word, as if you hadn't figured it out already, my dream girl. Utterly. Perfect. And whaddayaknow... she had a husband. {glower} Curse you, Blair Magazine!
Humph. But we still had a marvelous conversation, and I gave her my phone number just... y'know... in case. Heh. Anyway. I sat down to the overture. One interesting I noticed from the start -- though the sound was full, complex, delicious, and so much more satisfying than any of my recordings even with good headphones, I realized I'd been used to cranking my music up way louder than they ever wind up sounding in real life. I was sitting dead smack in the center of the theater, about twenty rows back, but as soon as I heard the music start up, I wanted to vault over all the seats and dunk my head into the pit, because it felt both completely immediate and thrilling and live, but at the same time, too damn far away. But I don't know if I ever could have gotten close enough. Maybe it wasn't even the volume that was the problem, but just that it kept stabbing me with this eerie keening desire that I didn't even know the origin of, or how to feed it... I dunno. But my ears adjusted by the end of the first act, and it seemed plenty loud enough.
The orchestra, by the way, was fantastic. The french horns kept screwing up, but that's practically a holy tradition, hell. The sound of it altogether was like nothing else, and I've heard some pretty decent orchestras up til now. It was led by some French conductor I'd never heard of, Claire Gibault, and she really coaxed the fire out of it. Man. The first two arias, though they're two of my favorite ones in the opera, didn't really get me going, and I'm not quite sure why. Partly because the Ilia, though she had a really very beautiful voice, didn't pour out her phrases in the same agonizingly perfect way Cotrubas does. She purposely played her Ilia to be much more reserved, though, which I didn't quite like as much as Cotrubas's total heart-on-her-sleeve sweetheart, but which probably matches the plot more exactly. So her solo arias didn't move me in the same way, but she definitely definitely sparked up whenever the Idamante was on the screen. Then it was fierce and spectacular.
The Idamante was a very young mezzo, Jossie Perez, who was making her Washington Opera debut. She had a very unusual voice, which at first I was a little dubious about -- it has the richness and throatiness associated with true mezzos, but it also has this strange little core of very bright and piercing sound which you get in dramatic sopranos. I was expecting a soft mellow sort of tone like Von Stade's has, so it threw me a bit, but either my ears changed, or she altered it a bit along the way, because by the end of the show I was getting seized up in ecstatic delight over it. And what an actress!! Dude, you guys know how much I like Flicka. She's been one of my favorites from way way back. But this Perez chick was so ingenuous, heroic, vulnerable... everything she did was with such passion and conviction, that... there was no one else in the world for me when I watched her.
That was another interesting thing about this production. Like the DVD version, they made a choice to use stylized motions with their blocking; deliberate, broad, classical gestures. This sort of thing has to be done carefully. It can look so old-fashioned, even completely cheesy, unless there's a real purpose for it, and unless it carries the weight of genuine emotion with it. That night it was impeccable. It carried the tone of the production even better than the DVD version, I think, because there were fewer stilted jerky motions (like whenever they whirled around and hollered NETTUNO! which is really only to be used in games of By Jove, if you ask me) and many more powerful ones. The Zombiemante scene was a little confusing, and Elettra's final spaz-fest lacked verismo, somehow, but I ain't quibbling.
The chick next to me said, "I can see why this isn't performed more often." "Are you crazy?!!" I shrieked. "Well, it's a long opera... I think Mozart got better as he got older." (he wrote Idomeneo when he was 24.) I thought she was out of her gourd and told her so. After every act when the curtain went down and the lights went up I sat in my chair with my fists clenched for the whole ten minutes muttering furiously for it to be over. It sucked so bad to get an hour of magnificent music and then have to wait around for the next hit. I finally realized why they used to ask for so many encores and have intermezzos and symphonies performed on the same nights as the operas. Three hours isn't enough. It's not even halfway enough. At the end of it, I was so hyper and wound up and blissed out I had to jump around kicking lamp posts and whamming into fences before I could calm down enough to get back on the Metro. I hadn't felt that charged since the night I got hit in the head all those times. It was better than heroin, and only slightly more expensive. GODDAMN.
Anyway, back to the opera. Domingo sounded a little choked in the beginning... maybe he was sick or something. But it evened out by the end of the first act. He still had a very tight, forced, painful sound (though, at the same time, powerful and beautiful, if that makes any sense), but it was impossible to tell whether that was still his indisposition or whether it was deliberate, because, either way, it was utterly perfect for the character. He's a damn fine actor. I sort of preferred Pavarotti's because he was more agonizingly a father, but Domingo was definitely more of a king. And maybe it was because I wasn't able to see his face as close up as on the DVD. But he carried the heart of the myth and the music admirably.
The Elettra was great too. She got the most "bravas", predictably enough, and sang with plenty of gusto, but, I mean, that's kind of a giveaway, almost. The character is just so completely farking nuts and the arias are so DEMENTED that if they're done well, everyone's whooping and fainting at the end of them. The chorus was amazing. The very sad and foreboding one near the end... man, I dunno what it's called... but ooooooh. It was indescribable. Powerful and rich and stentorian, but swelling with sorrow and dread. It knocked the whole audience out by the end of it.
Speaking of the end of it, the end of the opera, I mean. Oh, it was the mightiest of mighties. It was the one thing that would have made me happy above all the rest, and I got it. Joy! Ok, the love duet between Ilia and Idamante is one of my favorites ever, out of anything. They're my favorite couple in opera, as I've mentioned before. And this time, like I said, Ilia turned into the most bewitchingly sweet and vivid beauty whenever Idamante was on stage. And Idamante was always perfect in every way. The love duet made me grin and hum in my heart and almost forget the horror of the plot right up until the part when they carried on the corpse of the little boy, ugh. I hate that part. But the very end of the opera, when all was set right (bastardizing the myth of course, but hey, that's the way things go), and Idamante was crowned king. He took his sword and brandished it in triumph and took his consort close to him and at the very last note, right when the curtain fell, leaned over and placed the most soulful, tender kiss on her sweet lips. That's right. The mezzo and the soprano kissed. No fake-out bait-and-switch cheek pressing, no fervent embraces, just one kiss, for one second, before the curtain brought us out of Crete and back into blasted Reality. GOD!!!
So. Mozart's first masterpiece (unless you count the Coronation Mass, which I definitely would, but, anyway, you know what I mean), and my first live opera. I didn't get any of the novel done on the way back either. I was too busy drawing fangs and devil horns on the happy homemaker in the ad on the back of the playbill and humming the "Vendetta e crudelta" bit from Elettra's aria and feeling that almighty buzz echoing through my spine... so now I've got to burn all the CDs in a hurry and write a whole lotta words doublequick. But if an anvil fell on my head tomorrow as I walked to Early Music, I wouldn't mind a bit. I will have died without any novels to my name, but at least I'll have gotten my opera.
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(7)
08:55:52 PM,Sunday 3 November 2002
I will blog more once I've collected myself.
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(1)
02:55:22 AM,Sunday 3 November 2002
The saffron of virtue and contentment is dissolved in the water-gun of love and affection.
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11:09:07 AM,Saturday 2 November 2002
There's a little mouse in my room. It zoomed behind the cardboard box I'm using for a computer desk. Man, those little suckers move fast. As long as it doesn't die or have babies, though, it can stay as long as it likes.
Me and my roommates watched Amelie tonight. Their comments: "Oh my gosh. This lady is not normal." "Why did she do that? Why doesn't she just go talk to him?" "Ooh, this is weird. This is freaky." "Agh! Why does she even fall in love with him?" "Maybe because he's different. Like she is." "That was pretty good."
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(2)
02:59:50 AM,Saturday 2 November 2002
Oh man, oh man. What a glorious day. Hardcore cornetto action from start to finish, but the finish!! Aaaah! It was a recital by the sweet and beautiful and amazing Kiri Tollaksen, and, man... y'know how I've been listening to my paltry collection of cornetto mp3s over and over 'cause the sound was so intoxicating? Freaking *nothing* compared to sitting right in front of one in a swept-gable chapel, not being able to think of melody, harmony, structure, form, tone, anything -- not like listening to music at all -- because you're drowning in the sound. It's the most rendingly poignantly polished pure true... I'm just gibbering now, I know. But, GOD. I want to live outside of time -- naked, rapt, and motionless, suspended and dissolved in the sound of a cornetto.
And then, whee! When I came home and was already jonesing bad and about ready to crank up my well-worn old few scrounged up mp3s, I found that the lovely australian fellow who runs the cornetto yahoogroup had put me on his mailing list and sent me four new ones! And they're fabulous of course. He also sent a picture of a receipt with the subject heading: "Buying Bacardi Breezers in the Aussie Bush". Hee. LIFE IS SUBLIME!
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(2)
08:30:27 PM,Monday 28 October 2002
Today I saw a Chinese restaurant called "Fu Wah".
I was sitting on the ground, waiting for the bus, and a man walked up to me. "You get up off of that cement! You're gonna catch himroys that way!" "I sit like this all the time," I said. "And I've never had any problem." "Oh, you're young now, but when you get older, you keep sitting on the cement like that, you'll catch the himroys. You know what himroys are, don't you?" "Um. Yes. But I'll take my chances, thanks." I stayed sitting. He walked off. Then he turned back and yelled over his shoulder, "Don't thank me, thank Jesus!"
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(4)
04:16:46 AM,Monday 28 October 2002
I've been listening to this mp3 kind of obsessively lately. It's built over a ground bass so simple that you'd think it'd just be monotonous, but somehow it's hypnotic instead. It's called Sonata Settima, by G. A. Bertola, and it's performed by a guy named Michael Collver, who's not only a cornetto virtuoso, but a famous countertenor. Hardcore. Anyway, I jive it because of the freaky dissonant bit in the organ that comes out of nowhere, and because of the way the high notes climb and float and ring out way above the flooting and noodling.
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09:26:41 AM,Sunday 27 October 2002
Tea bags and ramen for breakfast. Yum. But would you freaking believe it? I cleaned my room! My room hasn't been clean since September! And now I have Rudolph Valentino on my walls and freshly-pressed trousers and a writing table to put my computer on for NaNo, and life is GOOD, suckas. WOo!
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09:08:07 AM,Sunday 27 October 2002
"During my years of restoration, I also began to learn about this thing called womanhood. Goodness! Who knew there was so much to learn: plucking eyebrows, hair bleaches, hair waxings, facial mud masks, eye lash curlers, manicures, pedicures, push-up bras, tummy tuckers, rear-end boosters, last year’s colors, and next year’s fashions?"
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(1)
01:19:55 AM,Sunday 27 October 2002
Damn.
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10:28:37 PM,Saturday 26 October 2002
Finally, something that works. Foist! Foist!
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09:00:50 PM,Saturday 26 October 2002
Me want. (thanks to Neil)
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01:43:50 AM,Saturday 26 October 2002
T.I.A.C.I.L.W.: Dame Janet Baker. Why did she have to run off with that sportscaster lady from the BBC? Why not me? Why not me?!
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02:47:43 PM,Friday 25 October 2002
Lunch.
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01:45:37 PM,Friday 25 October 2002
