October 2012
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I prefer my opera to be aural rather than visual. Opera is a form that is made for listening, not watching — at least in my view. The music, Mozart or Verdi, is frequently transcendent and most satisfying. But on those occasions when I venture to the opera house and I have to deal with the cultic, cachectic audience and the grand-opera…
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I find it utterly fascinating that Romney and Obama, who are so unlike in so many ways and yet both to the best of our knowledge good "family men," are both descended from polygamists. Barack's great-grandfather Obama Opiyo had five wives and his grandfather, Hussein Onyango, had at least four. Such was the Luo tradition.…
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I was half-way through this neglected Cold War paranoia-mystery-Hitchcocky black-and-white (and noir all over) amnesia movie when I realized that I was watching a lineal ancestor of the Jason Bourne films. It's all there: the trauma, the amnesia, the shadowy organization determined to eliminate the amnesiac, the assassins, the hair-breadth 'scapes, the chases, the murky…
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All that is good and all that is bad about opera is summarized by the following splendid sentence. It comes from a plot summary of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore. Prepare to savor. "At the pre-wedding feast, Adina and Dulcamara entertain the guests with a barcarole." Is that genius, or what? Here's the situation: the plot's a little thin and…