The San Diego Opera is the next to fold. Michael Cooper in the Times announces.
It’s so gross I’d actually like to go there and see their closing production, Massenet’s Don Quixote, to pay my respects as much as anything else.
1 trillion-plus a year on military — virtually nothing for the arts. This is our government; this is the society we’ve created/allowed to be created.
Two subjects that the “mainstream” media usually won’t touch are galloping environmental degradation and raging economic inequality.
And wouldn’t you just know it? Those two nettlesome topics could be taking civilization toward the endgame.
No, I won’t say how this proves once again that today’s “mainstream” media is for the most part one of the most fringe, marginal communication operations since the invention of Cuneiform.
I won’t say that, I’ll simply say read Sarah Lazare at Commondreams.org as she responds to a new report sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Let’s make him live by his own hideous homiletics:
If starving schoolchildren whose parents are low-income will do so much for their souls, imagine what Ryan swearing off those $350-a-bottle wine indulgences would do for his?
A young opthalmologist told me that she studied ballet and Asian Indian folk dancing up through the time she graduated from college. “I wish I were dancing now,” she said. “No you don’t,” I told her, speaking from the standpoint of income. But she made me reflect yet again on how foolish and damaging has been the media’s de-culturization. It’s become CW throughout most of the “mainstream” commercial media that culture is no longer worth covering. Digital hasn’t done much better, either. A potentially advertiser-attractive audience has been shut out. But at the same time, a circular reinforcement has taken place, as readers and viewers are exposed to less and less cultural coverage–How much have our lives and spirits been impoverished as a result?
If you want to see the true face of today’s GOP look no further than Marco Rubio’s viperfish little mug. To prove that he’s a big man on the national stage and a bona fide GOPer, Rubio has been coming out with the ugliest, most divisive comments, both contemptible as well as contemptuous of large swaths of the American people. If the Dems had any idea of what opposition politics and playing to win means, they’d be issuing a Rubio bulletin on a daily basis, if not more often.
Paul Ryan is a thoroughly dishonest grifter who has been fawningly enabled by so much of our “mainstream” commercial media. But the irony of the $350-a-bottle wine quafer dissing the idea of free school lunches for the MANY, MANY children in need is so screamingly egregious that some outliers are actually commenting upon it. This would be the same Paul Ryan who was recenty given a credulous pass as he claimed to be deeply engaged in thinking about how to alleviate poverty.
Not to mention the lie that he used to buttress his Just So story on morality. But what’s new about that?
Click to find out what’s going on there. Hibernate during the winter they do not!
In their zeal to put up as many taxpayer-subsidized luxury high-rises in Manhattan as possible, our successive mayoral administrations certainly haven’t given much thought to what’s being displaced. Or just how diversity-impoverished our ever-more-ghettoized-by income city can become.
A woman who runs a dressmaking business from her apartment tells me about going downtown to the former fabrics-and-trimmings district and finding the suppliers she’d long patronized suddenly not there anymore. Inquiries determined that relocation to Long Island City had become unavoidable.
and you want to curl up with a biography of a turn-of-the-twentieth century opera star. I know you do. And one of the best is Clara Leiser’s Jean De Reszke and the Great Days of Opera.
Those sonically appalling Mapleson cyinders (recorded live at the old Met) do more justice to men’s voices than women’s, (as of course is true of the contemporary acoustic recordings) and De Reske is amazing in the fragments recorded during his final Met season in 1901.
You’ll find his L’Africaine costume (O Paradiso’s on the Maplesons) on display on the Parterre eve of the (new) Met. Gleams like it was made yesterday.
And next to De Reske’s is Olive Fremstad’s as Selika in the same opera. It’s an interesting Gilded age attempt at a specked African mud cloth effect.
Fremstad, too, is the subject of a fascinating bio: Mary Watkins Cushing’s The Rainbow Bridge.
De Reske destroyed the few test commercial recordings he made because he wasn’t satisfied with them. Fremstad left the few she made alone, although not all survive.
Both were consummate singing actors and uncompromising perfectionists.
Laura Clawson at dailykos.com describes how New York and Connecticut (governed by Democrats, both) are fighting the shameful cuts to food stamps.
