But it still doesn’t tell all.
Archive for April, 2008
Good stuff
Saturday, April 26th, 2008On This Day in History …
Thursday, April 24th, 2008On April 24, 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared war on poverty on Tommy Fletcher’s front porch in Inez, Kentucky, beginning a 44-year quagmire. Because this war is obviously unwinnable, I propose we begin withdrawing 60 days after the next President is sworn in.
On April 24, 2006, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced her secret plan to end the gas war. In a press release, she proclaimed, “Democrats have a commonsense plan to help bring down skyrocketing gas prices by cracking down on price gouging, rolling back the billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, tax breaks and royalty relief given to big oil and gas companies, and increasing production of alternative fuels.” Because gas prices have gone up $1.18 per gallon since this announcement, I think it’s high time the Democrats implement this plan.
Death By Blogging?
Monday, April 7th, 2008Is blogging hazardous to your health? According to a recent article in the New York Times entitled In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, the answer is yes. Matt Richtel, the author of the article, cites the following examples:
Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.
Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
The article concentrates on professional bloggers, some of whom get paid as little as $10 a post. For people who try to eak out an existence in the blogosphere by staying one step ahead of the competition, I’m sure the pressure is enormous.
But I think that amateurs like myself can also suffer as a result of overblogging. For me, the stress is two-fold:
1) Editing, re-editing, and re-re-editing my work. Wanting to put out a letter-perfect product, I spend much more time than I should agonizing over le mot juste. Maybe it’s my academic and paralegal background, but for me, attention to detail is not only a virtue, it’s an absolute necessity. I envy people who can blog as fast as their typing speed will allow and then hit the publish button without remorse, but if I don’t dwell on whether I’ve put in too many (or too few) commas or whether I should use a semicolon or a period, I feel I’m doing my readers a disservice. For example, I’m still not sure whether it’s “eak out” or “eake out” – and that’s still driving me nuts!
2) Comments. I welcome thoughtful critiques of what I’ve written, but nothing raises my blood pressure more than a comment that’s poorly thought out, abusive, or ad hominem in nature. I’ve always been of the opinion that people can disagree without being disagreeable. But when tempers flare, it’s probably best to agree to disagree and end the thread. My biggest problem is that I assume that if I just couch my argument another way, use another approach or find better examples, the other person will finally see my point of view. I guess I’m just a cockeyed optimist in that regard. Too many people (myself included sometimes) don’t want to engage in the pulling and hauling that lead to what Hegel calls thesis, antithesis and ultimately the synthesis of a new point of view. I don’t mind people politely declining to engage, but if they call me names or fabricate things about me out of whole cloth, that really gets up my ire.
Given the monetary compensation I get for blogging ($0.00 to date), you’d think I’d cut way back and find another hobby that’s less stressful. I guess it must be my ego; there’s something exhilirating about seeing your own words in print for the whole world to see. Unfortunately, there are more than enough people who don’t share that enthusiasm and have no qualms about telling me so in no uncertain terms.
La Bohème at the Met – in Amarillo!
Sunday, April 6th, 2008For anyone who knows me, either personally or through my posts at Ivory Dome, it’s no secret that I’m a big opera fan. Here in Amarillo, we have a really great opera company with a world-class performing arts center at its disposal. But with only two productions each season, I have to look elsewhere to feed my opera appetite. I used to attend at least one performance at the Santa Fe Opera each summer, but gas prices have been making that option less and less attractive.
Enter the Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD. Beginning in the 2006-2007 season, selected Saturday matinees have been simulcast on the big screen in High Defintion at participating theaters. During the first season, the closest theater was in Colorado Springs, even more remote than Santa Fe. But this season, the Hollywood 16 on I-27 in Amarillo joined the Met network.
The first two operas I attended (Gounod’s Roméo et Julliette and Britten’s Peter Grimes) didn’t really grab me. The quality of both performances was excellent, but I just wasn’t that familiar with either opera. It’s been my experience that the better I know an opera, the more I can enjoy the performance on all levels: sets, costumes, and acting, as well as the music. In addition, attendence in Amarillo was not very impressive – about a dozen at each performance.
But this Saturday’s opera was Puccinni’s La Bohème. Not only is this one of my personal favorites, it’s one of the most popular in the entire opera repetoire. This was reflected in attendence; I estimated 30 to 40 in the audience. The story is fairly simple: four young bohemians (an artist, a poet, a musician, and a philosopher) share a garret apartment in Paris. Rodolfo (the poet) meets and falls in love with Mimì, a seamstress who’s dying of consumption. They break up, but in the end Mimì returns to Rodolfo in order to die with him at her side. There’s a sub-plot involving a tempestuous relationship between Marcello (the artist) and Musetta, a real coquette if ever there was one. But the main story is about Mimì.
Richard Wagner referred to opera as Gesamtkunstwerk – a combination of music, drama and design (both costume and set) that is greater than the sum of its parts. This production of Bohème was a great example of this. The sets, designed by Franco Zeffirelli, are legendary for their realism, the costumes were authentic for the period, the cast members were believable actors as well as superb singers, and the orchestra was brilliant.
Mimì was played by the Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu. From her first entrance in Act I, I was stricken. The character of Mimì is so lovable, and Ms. Gheorghiu played it beautifully, both musically and dramatically. I’m always deeply affected at the end of the opera when Mimì dies, but I found myself emotionally invested from her first entrance, and certainly through Acts III and IV as her pending death becomes more and more inevitable. Whether it was Ms. Gheorghiu’s performance, my love of the character Mimì, or the fact that this was my first Bohème since facing my own mortality last May, this was the most memorable of the many performances of this opera that I’ve experienced over the years.
There’s one more opera this season, Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment featuring French soprano Natalie Dessay on April 26. I probably won’t attend this performance, because I’m afraid after the La Bohème, it might be anticlimatic. There’s also a live performance of Floyd’s Cold Sassy Tree that evening, and I don’t know if I can handle that much opera in one day. But even so, there will be 10 more operas next season, with the schedule to be announced this month. At $22 a ticket, it’s well worth the money.