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One of the big mistakes that’s made by operatic directing today is to treat opera as if it were a David Mamet play; whereas opera, in which people sing their thoughts, feelings, emotions, is a completely different animal than anything that purports to be naturalistic.

Apropos of Tosca, I think I said it pretty well in City Arts two yeas ago:

“Verismo opera, of which Tosca is one of the canonical examples, is a style of hyper realism; it is not naturalism. The great Toscas of old, as well as their stage directors, seemed to take to the opera more organically—creating searing theatrical experiences as a result—by accepting that Tosca herself was so mercurial that she made sense dramatically by not making sense. Tosca contains all emotions not just because all human beings potentially do, but because she’s a great performer and has to have them all readily available at her disposal.  She epitomizes the protean nature of the theatrical animal and the theatrical impulse.”

It is time to call the austerity-pushers for what they are: immoral.

Thom Hartman at alternet.org describes the enormous spike in suicide rates sparked by the relentless targeting by the pushers of those already victimized by the economic collapse—a collapse engineered, of course,  by those self-same pushers.

I wonder if Senator Feinstein thinks that Hartman is a real journalist?

I wish more legit actors would watch performances like this and absorb some of the breadth and pace out-of-time of operatic acting at its best.

I’m talking about their Tosca in Stuttgart in 1961.  It’s on you-tube in individual segments.

Let alone the two magnificent voices, they are visually and kinetically riveting.  London said that Tebaldi was his favorite Tosca, although he was great with everyone (on the audio evidence–this and the Ed  Sullivan show with Callas are the only surviving footage). There is extraordinary contact and concentration between them.

Before her too-precipitate weight loss, Tebaldi was lush and opulent.

London stands straight as rod, with feet sometimes turned out to show extra (aspiration to, on the part of Scarpia) elegance.   And yet you are always aware that he is a stunted as well as malevolent psyche.

Granted, you’ve got to be pretty shameless to get ahead in politics, but Feinstein’s audacity in self-righetously proclaiming who is and isn’t a real journalist is shamming on a level of audacity that almost deserves celebration.

Let us not forget, this is a Senator who utterly failed her constituents and the American population at large by refusing to exercise any of the oversight function with which she was entrusted.

Oh, don’t let me get started.  Read Sarah Lazare at Common Dreams!!

Defending Larry Summers? Offering more work to Timothy Geithner?

In The New York Times, Annie Lowry reports behavior from the President and his team of economic incompetents that will have you running for cover–or more productively, getting on the phone to your Senators.

And let us not forge that the President continues to privately press for cuts to Social Security and Medicare, while publicly bemoaning economic inequality.

I interviewed Violette Verdy about seeing Alla Osipenko dance in Paris with the Kirov in 1961:  Osipenko, recalled Verdy, “had a body that allowed her to show you her imagination, her incredible sense of neo-classicism–using the classical technique in a completely personal way to create shapes and emotions that one didn’t expect.”

From an interview with Marianne Lipanovich in San Francisco Cultural Voice back in 2011.

“I watch the X Factor, and it’s terrible. You can go to Juilliard any year and hear and see much more talented and beautiful singers. . . .

“I heard Piers Morgan — he’s universally a laughingstock here — on CNN. He’s so ignorant. He said opera was for rich, upper-class kids. I was shouting at the TV. We did Don Carlos, 10 shows with 4,000 people at each show. That’s 40,000 people for one opera. . . .

“I worry we won’t have opera houses, though. Covent Garden had a slogan a few years ago: ‘Everyone Needs Opera.’ They don’t. We just have to have enough people.”

that the “mainstream” commercial media is emitting re: the puling heir, Nafeez Ahmed in the Guardian speculates on what the planet may very well look like by the time the newborn is is a young adult.

And let’s put it this way, the Prince’s Dukely Dad–like the rest of us–has his environmental repair work cut out for him.

Nate Silver at Deadspin: “ I’d argue that MOST political pundits are completely useless; the outliers are the few who are actually worth reading.”

I might add that what most of the pundistry class actually and actively do is make a mockery of the very term.  They’re wrong about everything; they pay little attention to actual empirical fact or data, they disgorge agenda and conventional wisdom like they’re going out of style, and they often get paid a shitload of money for their poker-faced buffoonery.