Said you want to dance while the world stops

[sovay]

Today's mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #59. The issue is themed around music, fire, and ghosts; it contains especially recommendable work by Craig Rodgers, Alexandra Seidel, Tim Jeffreys, F. Brett Cox, Stephanie M. Wytovich, and Davian Aw, as well as my poems "The Great Fire" and "The Women Around Achilles." The latter was written as a gloss on the story of Achilles on Skyros, a piece of post-Homeric midrash whose gender essentialism has always sat badly with me; the former is a very recent take on chronic illness and politics. There is a ridiculous typo in one of them which is entirely my fault.

1. Last night I attended the premiere of Michael Veloso's Trinity (2018) at Lexington High School. I desperately want a recording. I have very high standards for atomic art and this piece easily exceeds them; I know less about twenty-first-century classical music than I should, but anything where I can hear neutrons clicking and cascading and the furnace churn at a fireball's heart is a success by me. It was not quite as weird to revisit my old high school auditorium as I had been worrying.

2. I woke this morning hearing the last stanza of Kipling's "The Widow's Party"—Bellamy's setting that uses the tune of "Dol-Li-A." All I can remember of my dreams is that I was singing it; I don't know when or for whom. It's been in my head all day, especially when I walked to the library and back to pick up a research book. We broke a King and we built a road—

3. I appreciate handful_ofdust tagging me Leslie Howard in one of the cuter moments of Berkeley Square (1933). I also appreciate her commentary on this photograph of Ida Lupino, Roscoe Karns, and Toby Wing. Whatever they just suggested, he'd be an idiot to refuse.

4. I don't understand what kind of person could read the headline "Green-haired turtle that breathes through its genitals added to endangered list" and not want to save it on the spot.

5. I am never not going to be happy that my fifth-grade teachers taught us about probability by teaching us to play craps so that we learned (a) about probability (b) the house always wins.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Number 5 is indeed praiseworthy.

The author's description of Trinity is intriguing. What other atomic themed art did it bring to mind?

[sovay]

Number 5 is indeed praiseworthy.

I had good fifth-grade teachers. They ran a nine-month unit on human sexuality and reproduction after one of them got pregnant at the beginning of the school year. There was a baby in the spring.

The author's description of Trinity is intriguing. What other atomic themed art did it bring to mind?

Mostly it sounded like itself, but I would put it alongside Dana Falconberry's "Alamogordo" (2016) and Oppenheimer Analysis' New Mexico (1982) as completely different approaches to and equally powerful evocations of the Manhattan Project and its aftermath.

[ethelmay]

They ran a nine-month unit on human sexuality and reproduction after one of them got pregnant at the beginning of the school year. There was a baby in the spring.

Sounds potentially rather expensive, as curriculum goes.

[sovay]

Sounds potentially rather expensive, as curriculum goes.

I don't think it could have been a regular feature, but as an improvised one-shot, it was awesome.

[alexxkay]

Re: atomic art
One episode of the recent Twin Peaks was heavily themed around atomic weaponry (to the extent that Lynch themes are at all discernable). Rather than the "normal" Badalamemti score, it used a lot of "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima".

Re: making good use of pregnancies
One of my all-time favorite productions of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was a student production at Brandeis. Due to the long lead times involved, they didn't find out until after casting that, during production week, Titania was going to be eight months pregnant. They designed her costume to emphasize her belly. Her speech about her handmaiden's pregnancy got fascinating new layers.

[sovay]

One episode of the recent Twin Peaks was heavily themed around atomic weaponry (to the extent that Lynch themes are at all discernable). Rather than the "normal" Badalamemti score, it used a lot of "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima".

I must have heard that; I could see Lynch using it well. Klaus Badelt's score for K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) turned out to have built its reactor scenes around variations on Richard Einhorn's "Voices of Light" (1994), which I now want to hear in its intended context.

Due to the long lead times involved, they didn't find out until after casting that, during production week, Titania was going to be eight months pregnant.

I love the idea of a pregnant Titania. I would hear it leap out on parent and original.

[jesse_the_k]

Thank you for introducing me to Dana Falconberry, who makes the kind of music I adore.

[sovay]

Thank you for introducing me to Dana Falconberry, who makes the kind of music I adore.

You are very welcome. I love that album and "Alamogordo" best of all. I bought it on the strength of hearing "Powerlines."