I woke up and fed the cats and did some work and checked the internet to find myself recommended in NPR's Click If You Dare: 100 Favorite Horror Stories, right between Lovecraft and Junji Ito:
What must it be like to know your family will all return to the deep to live forever under the waves in fabled Y'ha-nthlei—and to know that a genetic quirk dooms you forever to dry land? Or worse, to live trapped between wave and shore? Poll judge Ruthanna Emrys calls this story "my single favorite modern deconstruction of Lovecraft. ... Sonya [Taaffe] is among my favorite emerging voices and not nearly enough people have heard of her."
Considering everyone else on that list, it's an honor. Also it's NPR, so I may have screamed a little.
Links I was planning to post before my afternoon got happily derailed:
1. In 2011, Johannes Martin Kränzle got my attention when I watched the Glyndebourne Festival Opera's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in my first, absurdly gratifying experience of livestreaming. (I got up very early and futzed with my computer until I got it hooked up to the TV and watched five hours of Wagner straight. Never really wrote about it. Still think about the production to this day. Totally forgot until now to look for the professionally available recording. There's a DVD!) He has since returned to the part of Beckmesser in what sounds like a fascinating staging by the first-ever Jewish director at the Bayreuth Festival: "The conceit is that Wagner is hosting a household performance of 'Meistersinger,' and members of his family and his circle are matched to suitable roles. Cosima becomes Eva; Liszt is Pogner, her father; Levi, not surprisingly, is Beckmesser. As for Wagner, he divides himself between the older, rueful master Sachs and the brilliant upstart Walther von Stolzing. Michael Volle, singing Sachs, and Klaus Florian Vogt, as Walther, are both made up to look like the composer. Volle's impersonation is especially convincing: he captures the antic, almost clownish personality that many of Wagner's contemporaries recalled. Johannes Martin Kränzle, as Levi/Beckmesser, evokes the harried but resilient character of the conductor, whom Wagner alternately humiliated and embraced." Alas, if Bayreuth has a livestream, I suspect I missed it, because I'm not seeing any pointers, and my planet's continuing failure to invent safe, reliable teleportation helps me none. My brother's in Germany right now. Who knew that I should have gone with him?
2. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rosefox: "A Former Opera Singer, Jewish Convert Fuses African-American and Yiddish Music." I will be looking for Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell's Convergence (2018) as soon as I can afford it and I am intrigued by Tsvey Brider besides.
3. Courtesy ofselkie: from the memoirs of Haika Grossman, the Bialystok Ghetto uprising. Not light, but important reading. "It is not pity you are asked to give the world but deeds that will free mankind from the nightmare of oppression and enslavement."
After making this post, I learned of the death of Aretha Franklin. Now I need to find a copy of The Blues Brothers (1980), which may well be the first place I heard her voice, that inimitable instrument of a generation and beyond. Think. Respect.
What must it be like to know your family will all return to the deep to live forever under the waves in fabled Y'ha-nthlei—and to know that a genetic quirk dooms you forever to dry land? Or worse, to live trapped between wave and shore? Poll judge Ruthanna Emrys calls this story "my single favorite modern deconstruction of Lovecraft. ... Sonya [Taaffe] is among my favorite emerging voices and not nearly enough people have heard of her."
Considering everyone else on that list, it's an honor. Also it's NPR, so I may have screamed a little.
Links I was planning to post before my afternoon got happily derailed:
1. In 2011, Johannes Martin Kränzle got my attention when I watched the Glyndebourne Festival Opera's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in my first, absurdly gratifying experience of livestreaming. (I got up very early and futzed with my computer until I got it hooked up to the TV and watched five hours of Wagner straight. Never really wrote about it. Still think about the production to this day. Totally forgot until now to look for the professionally available recording. There's a DVD!) He has since returned to the part of Beckmesser in what sounds like a fascinating staging by the first-ever Jewish director at the Bayreuth Festival: "The conceit is that Wagner is hosting a household performance of 'Meistersinger,' and members of his family and his circle are matched to suitable roles. Cosima becomes Eva; Liszt is Pogner, her father; Levi, not surprisingly, is Beckmesser. As for Wagner, he divides himself between the older, rueful master Sachs and the brilliant upstart Walther von Stolzing. Michael Volle, singing Sachs, and Klaus Florian Vogt, as Walther, are both made up to look like the composer. Volle's impersonation is especially convincing: he captures the antic, almost clownish personality that many of Wagner's contemporaries recalled. Johannes Martin Kränzle, as Levi/Beckmesser, evokes the harried but resilient character of the conductor, whom Wagner alternately humiliated and embraced." Alas, if Bayreuth has a livestream, I suspect I missed it, because I'm not seeing any pointers, and my planet's continuing failure to invent safe, reliable teleportation helps me none. My brother's in Germany right now. Who knew that I should have gone with him?
2. Courtesy of
rosefox: "A Former Opera Singer, Jewish Convert Fuses African-American and Yiddish Music." I will be looking for Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell's Convergence (2018) as soon as I can afford it and I am intrigued by Tsvey Brider besides.3. Courtesy of
selkie: from the memoirs of Haika Grossman, the Bialystok Ghetto uprising. Not light, but important reading. "It is not pity you are asked to give the world but deeds that will free mankind from the nightmare of oppression and enslavement."After making this post, I learned of the death of Aretha Franklin. Now I need to find a copy of The Blues Brothers (1980), which may well be the first place I heard her voice, that inimitable instrument of a generation and beyond. Think. Respect.
