Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning

Courtesy of First World War.com Vintage Media, which I discovered last night during a particularly profitable bout of insomnia, I have a new theme song. (MP3, right-click to download and all that jazz.) Proving that the oral tradition still functions in contemporary America, I'd actually learned this song from my mother and my grandparents under the title "Someday I'm Going to Murder the Bugler"; but I'd never heard a recorded version. The Harry Champion songs are also highly recommended, especially "A Little Bit of Cucumber" and "My Old Iron Cross," and the classic "Henry the Eighth, I Am" (found here), which again I'd learned by familial transmission and never heard in its own time period. But I warn you that Enrico Caruso's 1918 rendition of "Over There" is just conceptually bizarre.

Speaking of Caruso, this is a marvelous site for historical opera. I've been collecting baritones right and left, and a few sopranos as well. Milada Šubrtová's "Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém" (Rusalka) gives Renée Fleming a run for her money. This site isn't bad either. Even based on a really, really scratchy recording, Pasquale Amato's "Largo al factotum" (Il Barbiere di Siviglia) has just made him one of my heroes—it's the careless laughter halfway through, as though Figaro's own cleverness tickles him so much he can't even get through the coloratura, and the crazy la-ra-la-ra-la after the finale. If he was as much of a character actor as he sounds, I'm very sorry I missed the chance to see him; by more than half a century, but even so.

Lastly, the Poluski Brothers make me laugh. Listen to "Misunderstood." Abbott and Costello, eat your heart out.

My soundtrack for the last twenty-four hours has been very interesting.

Why we had to just watch films instead

Dear Hollywood and/or Joseph Campbell,

Please give me my brain back. A few nights ago, I dreamed I was a stripper in a bar for fallen angels. Last night, I dreamed I was the antagonist in an adolescent girl's progress through a dreamworld slightly cracked from reality, in which all the figures were reflections of herself (and myself, who was her counterpart), all our various potentials and permutations, and she had to winnow down to the true selves before we could shake hands and she could wake up.* I appreciate that my subconscious has a better eye for cinematography than I do when awake, and I understand that free-floating mythic weirdness has to go somewhere. But does it have to be mythic weirdness with a mainstream appeal?

This is not at all what I would have expected from several rounds of pre-1930's opera and a re-read of Fritz Leiber's The Big Time before bed.

Thank you,

*I've seen The Wizard of Oz. I've seen Labyrinth. I have not seen Mirrormask, although I fully intend on it. Still: what gives?