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Consult Dan H. Marek’s Singing: The First Art.

He’s examined all the old Bel Canto manuals and confound it–they still work!

And he’s done so much to synthesize his own method and render it coherent to the reader.

Re: Hillary’s alleged redoubtable  wisdom and expertise, Jim Sleeper at Salon writes:

“It’ a recurring irony in American politics: From Herbert Hoover to Alan Greenspan, from Woodrow Wilson and his negotiators at Versailles in 1919 to the architects and apologists of our wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the supposedly most qualified and most ‘in the know’ didn’t know what they were talking about.”

Well, it’s a small step in the right direction:

The Jefferson Market library is now open till 8:00 p.m. four nights a week!

And open as well on Sunday afternoons.

Mark Karlin at buzzflash for truthout points out the way our gargantuan military budget is sold to the public–

“From the propaganda of the US government — and its echo chamber in the corporate media — you would think that our nation is under a dire military threat, with Russia, China and other countries chomping at the bit to enter conflict with the self-proclaimed world superpower.”

And yet our military budget dwarfs all of theirs–theirs being ANY other country in the world. And remember, we the U.S. public is told over and over again it does not deserve health care, education, et. al.  et. al. Apparently the fact that we ask anything but unparalleled military expenditure is a sign of our presumption.

We are as a result falling further and further behind the rest of the developed world.

Karlin quotes Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project:

“The less we spend on Pentagon contractors that profit from fear and conflict, the more we can spend on priorities like education, climate change and infrastructure to move our country forward into the 21st first century.”

I guess nature or nurture produces a touch of the picaresque in you.

I think of myself as maybe a little adventurous, but then my my father tells me about the jobs he had in high school/college.

We were discussing my half-uncle and aunt who eventually lived in Mineola, when my father popped out with the fact that he’d been a ticket taker in the county fair there back in the ’40s. Another time he worked in an ironworks, and one summer crewed on an ore boat as “coal passer and oil wiper”–that was the rating–as it traveled between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior.

With millions of Americans now apparently unable to discern fantasy from any but the most immediate, concrete external reality, prey  to endless simulations in which “news” shows promote fiction and “reality” shows strut their performance of actuality –

I want to say. . . I understand.

I had the same experience. Once.

On stage at the Metropolitan Opera, summer 1983, during American Ballet  Theatre’s annual season. Mid-afternoon, the stage was set for Tudor’s Pillar of Fire. A dress rehearsal must have just happened or been about to happen, because gloomy Pillar is never an opening ballet and so it wasn’t a pre-performance set up.

But the stage was dark, making the evocation of small-town lanes and destinations all  the more moody and mysterious. Oliver Smith’s 1942 design was still being used.

There was the house across the way, its walls designed to turn translucent to reveal for our benefit the happenings within–or the speculation thereof by Tudor’s heroine Hagar.

It’s a house of erotic abandon, a house of ill repute, a house that perhaps exists only in Hagar’s imagination.

A masterful set design.

I wandered around the stage, enjoying the way the ballet’s set was now the momentary property of only me. I turned the door of the house –and what do you know?

It opened. It was veritably a functioning door amid this theatrical realization of now opaque, now transparent planes, conducive come the performance to spectator omniscience–spectators in the audience, spectators on stage.

But what I can’t remember: did I dare to go in?

The point being, Laura Jacobs has just reviewed for the Wall Street Journal the Atheneum’s Gothic to Goth: Romantic Era Fashion & Its Legacy show. And woven in a little backstory about the Atheneum itself. All bases covered in this one, and I do want to see the show after reading her review!

OK let’s get serious. That title, btw, is a gloss on the 1967 documentary Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London, a behind-the-scenes look at the capital when it really Swung–and not just for the City and the Viscounts.

I love to drive slowly down Hartford/West Hartford’s Farmington Avenue and note such landmarks as the neighboring former homes of Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Got into that habit during my forty visits there to interview Osipenko in the late-1990s.

and also, my heart goes pitter-patter as I approach the Tangiers specialty food store.

But the jewel in Hartford’s cultural crown is theWadsworth Atheneum museum, a now much-enlarged survivor of the Twain-Stowe era.

Up to now I’ve been there only twice, both times to see their exhibit of their collection of Diaghilev costumes.

But now it seems another visit is a MUST.

that you know how phony the Sanders non-stumble “stumble” about the big-banks-couldn’t-come-a-moment-too-soon break up is?

what is it, really, that a leader does? Hunker way, way down into the weeds?

No. S/he above all sets policy direction.

Does anyone want to talk for a moment about how deeply Ronald Reagan understood the policy details that made his disastrous revolution happen?

I don’t think so.

President Obama must now make it clear that he is not going to let the Republicans mug this country and its democratic system of government: if they continue to refuse to give Merrick Garland a hearing, he will be forced to go ahead and seat Garland on the court without a hearing.

Obama has never really been able to wrap his mind around who and what the current GOP is–but, on the other hand, it’s never too late!