San Francisco Ring Cycle

Every article about a new Wagner Ring Cycle has to give a brief, witty description of the costumes, stage decor, and overall theme. It never gets old; they’re always delightful and make me laugh, even if the routine starts to resemble the amusement of pressing a button at some website with a random haiku generator or random postmodernism generator.

There could even be a random city as the dateline, chosen from a database of world cities. Anyway, here’s the latest:

“SAN FRANCISCO — When the three Rhinemaidens appear at the opening of the San Francisco Opera’s production of Wagner’s ‘Rheingold,’ they look like wholesome young women in gingham dresses right out of a John Ford western. Alberich the dwarf intrudes on the scene, a grimy forty-niner in sturdy boots and overalls, panning for gold and looking desperate.

Wotan and his dysfunctional family of gods look like characters out of ‘The Great Gatsby.’ The preppy Donner and Froh wear beige suits emblazoned with the family crest; Wotan could be a robber baron in leather boots, frock coat and fedora; his wily wife, Fricka, has a perfect permanent and a dignified dress.”

This one doesn’t sound half bad.

too weird even to be in The Onion, but it’s reality

Actually, sounds more like an April Fool’s joke. And how is it even possible?

The Michigan State-North Carolina men’s basketball game in November will be played on board the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, the aircraft carrier from which Osama bin Laden’s body was dropped into the sea.

This has to be the most bizarre sports idea of all time. Is this really happening?

HERE.

If you want my opinion, I think this is in horrendously bad taste, offers a gratuitous terrorist target, and seems like a needless way to mix sports with crude patriotism. And I’m perfectly happy that bin Laden is gone, so this isn’t me trying to say something else under the guise of a critique of bad taste. It’s simply in bad taste. Someone please cancel this before it happens.

If you’re going to do that, then why not turn the U.S.S. Carl Vinson into a charity al-Qaeda haunted house for Halloween? Or allow people to pay $500 to drop a replica bin Laden mannequin into the Pacific Ocean? It’s that crass an idea.

Or why not fly the Michigan State and North Carolina teams into Pakistan on stealth helicopters, pave a court in the yard of the bin Laden compound using quick-dry concrete, then use Navy SEALs to fight holding actions around the court for two hours while the game is in progress?

Whatever happened to Obama’s line, “We don’t need to spike the football.”? The basketball game is really spiking it. Unless I’m missing some angle here, this is the height of crudity and vulgarity.

here’s that Dublin art show

“Tool-Use.” Opens tomorrow.

Click HERE.

now reading again

Hilary Spurling’s two-volume Matisse biography, just because one of the Irish contingent mentioned it in Venice. I received it as a Christmas gift in 2005, dug in right away, greatly enjoyed it, but then was inexplicably sidetracked by other things and forgot to finish the book. I was going to start it again after attending the very nice Matisse show in Chicago a year ago, but was again sidetracked. This time I won’t let myself get sidetracked; this will be a good summer reading project during writing breaks.

Matisse was not an immediate favorite of mine. The gateway into his work was opened for me by Picasso’s admiration for him (and now Picasso is irrelevant to the process; I simply like Matisse now). Matisse is a fascinating figure in his own right, on top of which he gives us a “lite” version of Van Gogh’s late bloomer story, but carrying it out over a much longer stretch of time, and with a certain basic sanity than Van Gogh obviously lacked, despite the brilliance evident in his amazing letters.

on Sterling’s radar again

I’m glad science fiction star Bruce Sterling is getting such a kick out of activities over here. Over at Wired, he has posted an excerpt from my conversation with Diarmuid Hester which appeared recently in Mute.

HERE.

my Amsterdam Meillassoux lecture has just been published

I didn’t realize it was up already, but the good people at continent have now published my March lecture from Amsterdam, “Meillassoux’s Virtual Future.”

The lecture was held on the night of March 11 at Spui25. I also gave one in Amsterdam the previous night at Crea, but it’s not yet published.

Click HERE.

Tamanya update

Preoccupied as I’ve been by her hand-biting issues, I’ve failed lately to mention how satisfied I am by the way this kitten is flourishing.

Her fur becomes softer and prettier by the week. As an athlete she is world-class for kittens, courageous enough to dare ever riskier and more imaginative leaps every couple of days. Often her degree of creativity astonishes me.

It should also be said that the biting is always the final stage of much more affectionate behavior. Whenever I reappear after an absence, she runs up with a single meow, demands to be picked up, then purrs in my arms for 5 or 10 minutes. From there it starts becoming more aggressive, more attack-oriented, with claws and teeth involved. I get the sense that she’s trying to take her affection to the next level, and just can’t think of any way to do it other than a quantitative increase in interactions: harder clawing and harder biting.

I’ve seen this from pets before. My parents’ fox terrier would go into a kind of trance whenever he saw horses. And he was happy to remain in that admiring trance for a little while, but then the only way he could think of to develop his affection for the horses was to start barking loudly and aggressively.

But watching Tamanya jump, and creating inducements for her to do so, is one of my favorite activities.

smile with only eight front teeth showing

Painful even to think about, but it’s one of the rules for attendants on the soon-to-launch Beijing-Shanghai bullet trains. HERE.

busted for saggy pants

This seems like another abuse of authority. University of New Mexico football player Deshon Marman boarded an airplane with saggy pants that exposed his underwear. HERE.

Rude and tacky, perhaps. But there’s apparently no dress code forbidding it, and they did let him on the plane, after all. Then this:

“Wunder referred questions about details of the incident to police but said it is her understanding that the incident began with Marman’s attire but escalated when ‘he repeatedly ignored crewmember instructions.'”

A good defense lawyer ought to be able to eat this up. You shouldn’t let him on the plane and then hassle him into a non-crime.

In fact, if I were a professional defense attorney I would go out of my way to attack these sorts of petty little abuses of power.

doesn’t matter

“POLL: Obama Loses to Generic Republican…”

But he’s not going to be running against a “generic Republican.” Instead, he’s going to be running against a specific human Republican, any of whose weaknesses are going to look much more glaring than Obama’s own (of the list of possibilities we’ve seen so far, at least).