Sorry, Don G, Wetsuits and Robyn H.
Sorry
Haven’t blogged much – things have been busy and I’ve been dealing with stuff that well doesn’t quite lend itself to blogging about. At least not in a band blog. Anyway things are not quite as hectic – although still quite mad so here goes.
Saw an opera over the weekend. Now when I tell people I like the opera I noticed there is a half beat pause where folks aren’t quite sure what to make of that – seeing as I also sing things like people with insect heads – but that’s their look out.
Anyway I saw Mozart’s Don Giovanni which while good did leave me a bit well not quite satisfied. It wasn’t the singing or the actual music – Mozart never wrote a wrong note in his life were as say Beethoven (my personal favorite about the major composers) did have off nights from time to time – as much as I have tried I am unable to get all way through Wellington’s Victory – Beethoven was deaf when he composed it but this is one of the few times he produced a piece of music that sounds like a deaf man wrote it.
By the by I find the late String Quartets by Ludwig to be inexpressibly moving. I find them profoundly moving in a way that does not adequately lend itself to verbal description – which is part of the reason music exists to say things that words can’t or don’t.
That said back to Mozart – well Don Giovanni is the story of well Don Giovanni a utterly amoral nobleman who spends his time bedding down every woman he can (his servant carries around a book with the names – it’s a big book. Mine wouldn’t be so big) whether by standard seduction or just flat out assault. The opera opens with a masked Don foiled in his attempt to rape a young woman. He is them confronted by the woman’s father who the Don promptly kills. Well okay pretty grim stuff in the first five minutes.
Looking back at it now – my problem is that for the rest of the time – it’s acted mostly like a bedroom farce – the don is after a newly married peasant girl, there’s a former conquest of the Don’s following him around and warning all the other women he talks to – there is the woman he tried to rape and her fiancée trailing about after him. It really plays like farce – and the music goes along with it – very well – but there is that dead guy in the first scene – and maybe I’m all fashioned but attempted rape is hardly the basis of a comedy (unless it’s a real dark one)
So it goes on in this vain – with another attempted rape (the peasant girl) and then at the end Don G is sent to hell by the living statue of the man he killed (In the opera I was worried about the singer playing the part – he had no mobility and he looked just a bit less graceful than Boris Karloff in Frankenstein – which when the hole in the stage opened up – all the better to drag the Don to hell with I was a bit worried for the actor.
And it was pretty damn long – even for an opera it was long – I suppose in the old days they showed up late (plowed to the gills as well) and then left early. (At any singing of Handel’s messiah there is a mad scramble to leave after the second act – which features the halleluiah chorus - it’s kind of amusing.).
Other matters. Police have declared that there was no foul play in the death of a conservative Minster who was found apparently self strangled, tied up, and wearing among other things two wet suits – two? The hell? There are other more lurid details but I’m not going to bother to look deeper into it – other than wonder you have to wonder if every single damn preacher who storms about gays and sex and the immorality of human beings isn’t a massive closet case. The evidence seems to point to that.
Been listening an obsessive way (do I ever do anything in less than an obsessive way? Even I wonder) to Robyn Hitchcock again. I am in a strange emotional state and Robyn is good for what ails me here – he really seems to be one of those guys who’s best lyrics are the ones that come off the top of his head – he’s not too afraid to sound foolish in pursuit of getting it right – he’s called songs a kind of dream so it would make sense he’d be more comfortable with the off the top of the subconscious writing style. Glass Hotel (a personal highpoint) is a song about well something quite moving – sometimes I think it’s the memory of a love affair, sometimes I think it’s about someone dying – but there is a real depth to the emotion – and a beauty to is that moves me enormously He’s also got a thing about fish – he keeps naming them in songs. He’s all in all a pretty weird guy.
Honestly I wouldn’t have written people with insect heads in quite the way I did without his voice in my head.
Peace, Love, Glass Hotels
Haven’t blogged much – things have been busy and I’ve been dealing with stuff that well doesn’t quite lend itself to blogging about. At least not in a band blog. Anyway things are not quite as hectic – although still quite mad so here goes.
Saw an opera over the weekend. Now when I tell people I like the opera I noticed there is a half beat pause where folks aren’t quite sure what to make of that – seeing as I also sing things like people with insect heads – but that’s their look out.
Anyway I saw Mozart’s Don Giovanni which while good did leave me a bit well not quite satisfied. It wasn’t the singing or the actual music – Mozart never wrote a wrong note in his life were as say Beethoven (my personal favorite about the major composers) did have off nights from time to time – as much as I have tried I am unable to get all way through Wellington’s Victory – Beethoven was deaf when he composed it but this is one of the few times he produced a piece of music that sounds like a deaf man wrote it.
By the by I find the late String Quartets by Ludwig to be inexpressibly moving. I find them profoundly moving in a way that does not adequately lend itself to verbal description – which is part of the reason music exists to say things that words can’t or don’t.
That said back to Mozart – well Don Giovanni is the story of well Don Giovanni a utterly amoral nobleman who spends his time bedding down every woman he can (his servant carries around a book with the names – it’s a big book. Mine wouldn’t be so big) whether by standard seduction or just flat out assault. The opera opens with a masked Don foiled in his attempt to rape a young woman. He is them confronted by the woman’s father who the Don promptly kills. Well okay pretty grim stuff in the first five minutes.
Looking back at it now – my problem is that for the rest of the time – it’s acted mostly like a bedroom farce – the don is after a newly married peasant girl, there’s a former conquest of the Don’s following him around and warning all the other women he talks to – there is the woman he tried to rape and her fiancée trailing about after him. It really plays like farce – and the music goes along with it – very well – but there is that dead guy in the first scene – and maybe I’m all fashioned but attempted rape is hardly the basis of a comedy (unless it’s a real dark one)
So it goes on in this vain – with another attempted rape (the peasant girl) and then at the end Don G is sent to hell by the living statue of the man he killed (In the opera I was worried about the singer playing the part – he had no mobility and he looked just a bit less graceful than Boris Karloff in Frankenstein – which when the hole in the stage opened up – all the better to drag the Don to hell with I was a bit worried for the actor.
And it was pretty damn long – even for an opera it was long – I suppose in the old days they showed up late (plowed to the gills as well) and then left early. (At any singing of Handel’s messiah there is a mad scramble to leave after the second act – which features the halleluiah chorus - it’s kind of amusing.).
Other matters. Police have declared that there was no foul play in the death of a conservative Minster who was found apparently self strangled, tied up, and wearing among other things two wet suits – two? The hell? There are other more lurid details but I’m not going to bother to look deeper into it – other than wonder you have to wonder if every single damn preacher who storms about gays and sex and the immorality of human beings isn’t a massive closet case. The evidence seems to point to that.
Been listening an obsessive way (do I ever do anything in less than an obsessive way? Even I wonder) to Robyn Hitchcock again. I am in a strange emotional state and Robyn is good for what ails me here – he really seems to be one of those guys who’s best lyrics are the ones that come off the top of his head – he’s not too afraid to sound foolish in pursuit of getting it right – he’s called songs a kind of dream so it would make sense he’d be more comfortable with the off the top of the subconscious writing style. Glass Hotel (a personal highpoint) is a song about well something quite moving – sometimes I think it’s the memory of a love affair, sometimes I think it’s about someone dying – but there is a real depth to the emotion – and a beauty to is that moves me enormously He’s also got a thing about fish – he keeps naming them in songs. He’s all in all a pretty weird guy.
Honestly I wouldn’t have written people with insect heads in quite the way I did without his voice in my head.
Peace, Love, Glass Hotels
posted by Unknown at 12:05 PM
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