To find there but the road back home again
And then last night I slept ten hours. I hope I haven't broken something. Have some links.
1. Courtesy of a friend who is not on Dreamwidth: Unleash the Archers, "Northwest Passage." Otherwise known as a female-led power metal cover of Canada's unofficial national anthem, wherein Stan Rogers is surprisingly well served by blast beats. I kind of want to hear them take on "Barrett's Privateers." I like the many-worlds band-tour video, too.
2. I knew of several female scientists of the Manhattan Project, but somehow I had missed Elizabeth Rona until her insistence on buying her own PPE—and surviving more than one radioactive laboratory explosion because of it—came up relevantly elsenet. I'd love to get hold of her professional memoir, but I suspect that was a project for the days when I had access to academic libraries.
3. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer: an important PSA about left-wing anti-intellectualism. Includes a nice recommendation for an Egyptology blog.
4. To be honest, since he had been involved in the premieres of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960) and War Requiem (1961), I had no idea until his obituary that harpist Osian Ellis had still been around, but I was absolutely delighted to learn he had also played for The Goon Show (1951–60).
5. Courtesy ofspatch: regarding the death of Rush Limbaugh, it's time once again for these valuable words.
1. Courtesy of a friend who is not on Dreamwidth: Unleash the Archers, "Northwest Passage." Otherwise known as a female-led power metal cover of Canada's unofficial national anthem, wherein Stan Rogers is surprisingly well served by blast beats. I kind of want to hear them take on "Barrett's Privateers." I like the many-worlds band-tour video, too.
2. I knew of several female scientists of the Manhattan Project, but somehow I had missed Elizabeth Rona until her insistence on buying her own PPE—and surviving more than one radioactive laboratory explosion because of it—came up relevantly elsenet. I'd love to get hold of her professional memoir, but I suspect that was a project for the days when I had access to academic libraries.
3. Courtesy of
moon_custafer: an important PSA about left-wing anti-intellectualism. Includes a nice recommendation for an Egyptology blog.4. To be honest, since he had been involved in the premieres of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960) and War Requiem (1961), I had no idea until his obituary that harpist Osian Ellis had still been around, but I was absolutely delighted to learn he had also played for The Goon Show (1951–60).
5. Courtesy of
spatch: regarding the death of Rush Limbaugh, it's time once again for these valuable words.
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It's scary! And it's especially scary from people who should know better!
Also: EVERGREEN TWEET.
Life anti-goals!
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Glad to be of signal-boosting assistance!
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Not quite as metal as I’d like, but Alestorm have covered it, if that helps: https://youtu.be/y9ZwQ_aX_QI
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I am afraid that when I follow the link, YouTube tells me "Video not available." It may be some kind of regional restriction.
[edit] Okay, I found a version that would play for me. Agreed that it could be even more metal, but it's very shouty pirate. Have I linked you Nathan Rogers and Barney Bentall?
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Another lovely intersection
Is Gangstagrass: tuneful hip-hop meets old-time.
I hope Woody Guthrie would have enjoyed this remix as much as I do: This Land
Re: Another lovely intersection
oh, this was so cool! thank you!
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That's a great arrangement though.
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Correction accepted.
That's a great arrangement though.
I really like it! It was not a combination that, described to me in advance, I would necessarily have expected to work, but fortunately I just clicked through the link on my friend's page and now I've played it like a dozen times in a row.
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R Limbaugh suffered from a different malady from Ann Coulter, but the result was the same: Like her, what he had to say originally needed to be said, and many, many people agreed - but where she got trapped in a death spiral of “Can You Top This,” only staying afloat by making ever more extreme and ultimately self-defeating accusations, he suffered from acute post-functional irrelevance, like the RCA man I recall who was master of vacuum tubes but knew nothing of transistors and was simply bypassed, lost.
Rush Limbaugh served a legitimate need and purpose, but the torch passed to a new generation and he was left stumbling.
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I don't usually presume to tell people come getcher friend, but I am looking around the metaphorical room.
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“You obviously did not look any too carefully at what was actually written there, or why. You are welcome to try again: You might get the message this time.”
… But now I doubt it. Minds, like parachutes, only work when open.
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You must have been banned by another commenter, since I have not banned you from my journal. I am just now seeing this conversation, which feels a little as though a grenade has gone off in my living room.
You have said many gracious things about the quality of my mind over the course of your comments on my journal, so I hope you can take its judgments seriously. I too found little of value in Limbaugh's shock-jock language of feminazis, false flags, and slippery slopes; I am not sure it was ever necessary to establish the discourse of fake news as a political tactic. I would have said as much originally. Since the conversation seems to have moved on from Limbaugh, however: I can take what seems to be the point of your alternate history that had the Civil War ended in full division, racism might have carried the day even more violently in the Union than did Reconstruction in our actual history and the Confederacy might have ironically found itself the more ethnically diverse of the two halves of the once-United States, but since it is still a fantasia in which there are no Black Americans, I cannot imagine it was any more pleasant for
In the seventeen years I have had this journal—first on LJ, then on DW—I have banned two people, both times for stalking me. I leave it to you whether you wish to continue interacting in my space. You have been supportive of me and I have appreciated it; I don't wish you to hurt people I care for and I am distressed and somewhat disenchanted that you have. If they no longer wish to interact with you, it is not a failing on their parts. None of these words is a warning. I recognize that if you consider me a closed parachute, I cannot change your mind, either.
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The context of that ‘alt history’ was a trendy required “diversity” assignment on a dictated topic that I found racist and offensive. (As you have mentioned it, imagine being required to write of what poisonous toadstools Jews are! Right.)
My response was along the lines of “Be careful what you ask for” - if I'm to write only of what damage whites have done, allow me to acquaint you with some little-known history… (“Lynching” was a Northern practice, as in New York in 1864 among many others, and unknown in the South - until it was imported at bayonet-point.)
But NONE of this is relevant here! It should never have appeared here! I did not start this problem and your censure should be on the one who did.
That is all I have or wish to say on this. Let this pass with its instigator - away.
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I am glad it is your last word on the subject. I suspect you are correct that you should have stepped away from this conversation sooner: it is not a concession to choose not to escalate. As it is, your continuation has insulted—ad hominem—someone who may be a stranger to you, but whom I count among my friends. The people who appear in my comments generally are. Please give that consideration when it comes to your methods of disagreement. I have studied honor cultures, but I prefer not to live in them.
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Re: “Can You Top This”
Another example of this would be Erich von Däniken. Though it was sensational at the time, his 1968 Chariots of the Gods is a calm, rational, sensible work which merely points, in Charles Fort fashion, at archeological mysteries that may be explainable in terms of extraterrestrial visitors, or simply beggar any explanation.×
By the time of Gold of the Gods et al., half the book is spent advancing utterly preposterous claims (we were genetically pre-programmed to invent ballpoint pens - no lie!) and the rest of it lambasts stuffed-shirt academia for not accepting his claims as fact!
“… Look, just stop, willya? Should’ve quit while you were ahead.”
× Throughout the jungles of Costa Rica are found many dozens of stone spheres, three or four feet across and weighing several tons, scattered across the forest floor as though dropped there: Stone balls, like giant marbles left lying where they fell - not tombs or mileposts or anything. Why were they made? How were they transported? Why were they abandoned? We simply don’t know. Yet there they are.
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I really wish "left-wing anti-intellectualism" was a contradiction in terms.
I may've asked this before: but have you got any recommendations for where I could get started with Britten? I really want to find some English-language opera I could get into.
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My work here is done!
Predictably I look at Unleash The Archers and retcon that as a radio soap. "An everyday story of metal folk."
I bet there'd be an audience for it if you did, too.
I really wish "left-wing anti-intellectualism" was a contradiction in terms.
I know.
I may've asked this before: but have you got any recommendations for where I could get started with Britten? I really want to find some English-language opera I could get into.
You personally I would try first on Peter Grimes (1945), which Britten wrote for his lover Peter Pears—of the dry white tenor—a kind of nineteenth-century maritime noir of a fisherman on the Suffolk coast who may be a serial murderer of his apprentices or may have lost one after the other through terrible accident and either way when the tide of his community turns against him, even a man who hasn't been a notorious rough-tempered outsider and dreamer can't swim strongly enough to breast it. It's sea-soaked, ambiguous, troubled and troubling and I love it. To my knowledge there's no recording of the original cast, but there is a very fine one from 1958 with Pears and Claire Watson and the rest of the Royal Opera House with Britten himself conducting. I've never seen it performed live and would love to.
The Britten operas I have seen live are The Turn of the Screw (1954) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960). I described the former once as "a six-person rite enacted in the rigorous drag of a nightmare . . . the sense of trapped and repeating time which the twelve-tone theme and its fifteen variations build into each scene: the past has not stopped happening and there is nowhere within the music to go" and I basically stand by that; it's slipperier and more hauntological than the original novella and plays significantly with Yeats' "The ceremony of innocence is drowned." You can get the premiere cast recording and I recommend that you do, because David Hemmings in his first career as a boy soprano sings the role of Miles. I don't appear to own a recording of the latter, which is slightly silly because I have actually seen it twice, once at the Yale School of Music in 2005 and once at the Boston Lyric Opera in 2011; the latter production generated, years after the fact, my poem "A Vixen When She Went to School." What I like best about that one is the casting of Puck as a non-singer—a tumbler and, in the first production I saw, did tricks with fire—and of Oberon as a countertenor, although then I feel Britten really missed a trick by not writing his Titania as a contralto instead of a coloratura; she and Oberon should be equally reversed from human expectations. There is a live recording of the premiere conducted by the composer and I really should just pick it up one of these days.
I could have sworn I had a recording of his Albert Herring (1947), but if so it must be in storage, not on my hard drive; it's a sort of rustic screwball comedy concerning a market town's springtime crisis when the only virgin suitable to be crowned Queen of the May is the greengrocer's shy assistant, the eponymous Albert Herring. I've never seen it staged and would like to; it's always sounded like if done right it's a very funny gender-bending winner. I don't appear to own a recording of Death in Venice (1973), either, although I have a distinct memory of listening to one. Billy Budd (1951) is similarly famous and I have only heard excerpts from it. Everything else except for the one-act children's opera Noye's Fludde (1958) I am a washout on.
It is not an opera, but I love Britten's War Requiem (1962), which I would recommend you approach first in the form of Derek Jarman's 1989 film. I have been trying and failing to write about it for years. The closest I've managed is a comment recently to
As far as other operas in English are concerned, longtime favorites of mine are Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium (1946) and The Consul (1950) and Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (1955), any of which I am happy to expound further or shut up on. I know I have a bad case of the twentieth century here, but I have utterly failed to find purchase on John Adams even when he's writing about Oppenheimer. I loved Zhou Long and Cerise Lim Jacobs' Madame White Snake (2010), which I was lucky enough to see in its premiere by Opera Boston before it won the Pulitzer Prize, but I can't find a recording to point to. I enjoyed Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951) when I saw a concert version by Emmanuel Music in 2011, but it left me in the weird position of preferring the libretto and the performances to the music itself. Oh! Peter Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse (1980) is brilliant. God damn, I miss live theater.
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Nice! I am glad to know it. Also that it is the sort of opera that can stand a disco ball.
Adding to the hilarity, outside the venue I encountered a ticket scalper. For an opera.
That's beautiful.
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I know enough metalheads who might be game for it!
Thank you so much for discussing Britten - everything you've said here suggests I'll love him, so I'll see what I can find on CD. Please do expound on other favourites too, as much as you like. I would probably fall in absolute *love* with "The Lighthouse".
(Also, my God, "A Vixen When She Went To School" is *fantastic*.)
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I can't believe I don't have a recording of myself singing "The Black Swan." This would be the perfect conversation to drop it into and innocently walk away.
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I should clarify, that's not a critique of the performance. I just haven't heard you sound so like a residual haunting looped into itself since then. I can't say whether one ought to blame the industrial plumbing or the score.
Edit: I couldn't sniff it out, either! I was starting to doubt myself! A residual haunting in a collective living space within a hundred-eighty feet of me! The shame.
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You do know you're both selling this to me right? My own theory is that Sovay is a sea-fae.
*I can't believe I don't have a recording of myself singing "The Black Swan." This would be the perfect conversation to drop it into and innocently walk away.*
Damn! I've heard you read, but never sing. Are there any recordings of you performing that you can point me at?
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You're welcome! I went looking to see if I could find a good recording of the "Sea Interludes" from Peter Grimes which are sometimes performed as a separate suite and found them courtesy of André Previn, who thanks to the Muppets I always think of as "Andrew Preview": "On the beach (Dawn)," "Sunday morning by the beach," "Moonlight," and "Storm," which should give you some flavor of Britten's sea-writing. And here's "Now the Great Bear and Pleiades," the signature aria of Peter Grimes after he blows into the unwelcoming pub at the height of the storm, looking like a drowned man dreaming:
"Now the Great Bear and Pleiades where earth moves
Are drawing up the clouds of human grief
Breathing solemnity in the deep night.
Who can decipher in storm or starlight
The written character of a friendly fate—
As the sky turns, the world for us to change?
But if the horoscope's bewildering,
Like a flashing turmoil of a shoal of herring,
Who can turn skies back and begin again?"
Please do expound on other favourites too, as much as you like.
All right! The Medium is a claustrophobic weird tale whose inciting event is a séance where the boundaries between children's games and bereaved belief and a charlatan's drunken paranoia collapse suddenly with the cold brush of a hand in the dark; it was filmed in 1951 in the full noir-expressionist style with Marie Powers and Anna Maria Alberghetti and is just about the only opera I would set up against the strange stories of Robert Aickman. For years my standard audition aria was "The Black Swan," a murder ballad performed as a lullaby where the sun bleeds out and a sleepless, weed-mouthed lover roams the restless river bed. The Consul is a Kafkaesque fever nightmare of bureaucracy, where a husband can disappear without a trace into a paper trail and the same fading figures have haunted the waiting room for years and even a magician can produce anything out of his pockets—cards, flowers, doves—but the papers he needs to get out of this country tightening like a rope around all their necks. A televised production was recorded in 1960 with Patricia Neway and I have never seen it in full, but I was chilled and thrilled when its famous aria turned up on YouTube:
"To this we've come:
that men withhold the world from men.
No ship nor shore for him who drowns at sea.
No home nor grave for him who dies on land.
To this we've come:
that man be born a stranger upon God's earth,
that he be chosen without a chance for choice,
that he be hunted without the hope of refuge.
To this we've come:
and you, you, too, shall weep.
If to them, not to God, we now must pray,
tell me, Secretary, tell me,
who are these men?
If to them, not to God, we must pray,
tell me, Secretary, tell me!
Who are these dark archangels?
Will they be conquered? Will they be doomed?
Is there one—anyone behind those doors
to whom the heart can still be explained?
Is there one—anyone who still may care?
Tell me, Secretary, tell me!
Have you ever seen the Consul?"
It got into my poem "Acceptable Documentation." Susannah is an Appalachian murder ballad with roots in the apocrypha of Susanna and the Elders; I fell in love with it in college thanks to the 1962 recording with Phyllis Curtin and Norman Treigle and then had the joy of finally seeing it performed by the BU Theatre in 2010 with a pre-show talk by Curtin and Floyd, which is how I learned that the composer had grown up in the holler country he depicts, where a woman who lives by herself and a traveling preacher man can be on a one-way collision to Hell, just not the way anyone in town whispers. I used to perform its soprano arias "The Trees on the Mountain" and "Ain't It a Pretty Night?" Every time people refer to opera as some kind of reactionary and fossilized art form, I can point to any of these and cough meaningfully.
I would probably fall in absolute *love* with "The Lighthouse".
I wish I could get you a time machine to the performance I saw. I wanted the BLO to make a recording, but I don't think they had the rights to. Davies was openly queer and lived in the Orkneys—he collaborated famously with the poet George Mackay Brown—I see no reason for you not to like him.
(Also, my God, "A Vixen When She Went To School" is *fantastic*.)
Thank you!
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You're welcome!