A few weeks ago, a friend and I were discussing the relative merit of translated poetry. Thanks to Andrew for muddying the waters even further with this: Rimbaud or Babelfish?

Thing the first: Phin and I last night joined the ranks of the übergeeky, taking in a midnight showing of The Return of the King. Granted, we’re not nearly as obsessed as these guys, but I did feel like I should be wearing some sort of promotional swag (a satin jacket, perhaps? with the logo on the back? that would present an interesting fashion challenge). That said, and the presence of people in actual capes (!) at the movie theatre notwithstanding, I exhort each and every one of you to go and see it. It is excellent. The cinematography is stunning, the acting is consistently impressive, and the film on the whole manages to balance a certain heavy-handedness required of a huge epic story with a strong dose of humor and attention to the development of the individual characters. I’ve got to hand it to Peter Jackson for being the first director to really hold a trilogy of this scope together since… well, possibly ever. Now get a move on.

Thing the second: apologies in advance to those of you who are just getting used to the new site. I’m making some changes in the next few days. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Thing the third: encouragement sometimes comes from the most unexpected of sources. Normally, Fiction Bitch strikes terror into my very soul (link via Jeff), but catching up on her most recent decimations reviews – probably an ill-advised activity, since I’m experiencing a fairly serious bout of writer’s block – I found this nugget of wisdom: “Relax, and allow yourself to write whatever you want. Once you give yourself permission to not be clever, but to simply have fun with your writing, you regain your sense of play, and life returns to your writing. Try it; you may be surprised by the results.”. Best advice I’ve heard in a while. Thanks, lady.

sunday night at the den of iniquity (aka chez moi) featured the annual christmas tree-trimming festivus, my favorite seasonal event and, this year, one hell of a party. there was drinking, there was decorating, there were silly nicknames and much blathering and chili in abundance. and as far as i could tell, everyone from satansanta’s little helpers to the either painfully fashionable or just terminally late, a good time was had by all. i’m thinking lindsay’s hot spiced wine had a lot to do with that.

the pictures are, admittedly, terrible. i’m blaming that on the wine as well. convenient, no?

i remain convinced that the tree-trimming party is one of the Best Ideas Ever: you invite a bunch of people over, cook up a little food and a little booze, and they bring you more booze, entertain you with endless stories and laughter, decorate your house and then go home. and the tree? the tree, she is gorgeous.

thanks, everyone. i had a blast. merry christmas! now go check out the pictures. scoot!

I would not be at all surprised to hear that CuJo underwent electroshock therapy between last night’s game against the Sabres and tonight’s mess.

Now, I understand that standings aren’t everything, and that furthermore you can’t expect the top team in the division to beat the team in last place just because of their rankings, but I’ve got to be a little concerned when my team can pull out a 7-2 victory against Anaheim and only barely eke out a tie against the Blues the following night; and then the very next week follow a 7-2 win against the Sabres with a really quite pathetic 4-3 performance in Chicago. Especially when I haul my cookies all the way down to the United “Detroit Sucks!” Center. Granted, I know we’ve got lots of injured players; I know we’re missing Hasek and Yzerman et al. But still, can’t we play like the equal of our opponents when we’re actually favored to win? Please? Pretty, pretty please?

And while I’m at it, what in the name of all that’s holy is up with sending underage girls in skintight outfits with snow shovels out to “clear the ice” at every ESPN commercial break? Is this Humbert Humbert* stadium, or what?

And another thing: Samson et Dalila is incredible. We got to see a dress rehearsal yesterday afternoon (thanks, Sambo!), and Phineas got some great pictures.

I’ve been going to the opera all season, as usual, but not writing about it. Not being a particularly gifted reviewer, I generally prefer to simply enjoy the production, discuss it over a drink or two afterwards, and then move on. Every so often, though, something really piques my interest (or really pisses me off) and I decide to get all long-winded about it. This season, so far, it’s Wagner’s Siegfried, which was an excellent production on a lot of levels. The voices were spectacular, the sets and lighting were, for the most part, both functional and colorful… and the costumes. The costumes were really unconventional and, to me, really appealing.

Siegfried is a challenging opera. Yes, there’s the usual things: it’s Wagner and he’s a longwinded bastard (remind you of anyone?); the Lyric starts it at 6 and you don’t get out til 11. Musically, too, it’s a tricky animal: no choruses, not even any real arias to speak of. It’s largely sung dialogue, with a huge number of musical themes meandering throughout. Moreover, unlike many operas, if you’ve got your eyes shut and are just listening (provided, of course, you don’t understand German), you’ve got absolutely no inkling of what’s going on. The musical themes are that abstract. Finally, and perhaps most difficult of all, there’s no secondary characters in Siegfried. I’ve already mentioned the lack of chorus, but there’s not even a maid, or a sidekick, or a choirboy love interest. Everyone is an archetype. Gods, monsters, sinister dwarves and heroes, and that’s it. As a result of all this, it’s quite a challenge to make Siegfried accessible at all. Of course, there’s always the option of skipping it entirely or leaving after Act 1 (I know a lot of people who favor this strategy), but I’ve gotta hand it to the production design team this time around, particularly set/costume designer John Conklin, and most particularly his costuming choices.

Since everything about the opera is so abstract, it’s often been the approach of the scene design team to keep things as visually simple as possible. Siegfried winds up dressed in furry cloaks, everyone’s in varying shades of brown, gray and black, and everything… well, everything sort of melts together and puts you right to sleep. Conklin takes a very different approach to this production, clothing his characters in archetypal costumes borrowed from a number of different mythologies and traditions, each according to practical needs and the role of the archetype in this particular story.

Wotan and Brünhilde, as in Die Walküre (last season’s Wagner production), are clad in a quasi-postmodern combination of leather and cotton. For Wotan, this works more or less because he’s the wandering mystery man in this story, and well, what’s more mysterious than some dude with an eyepatch in a leather trench coat and fedora? Brünhilde’s only around for Act 3, and it’s a direct continuation of her role in Die Walküre, so that’s that.

The Nibelung dwarves, Mime and Albericht, are treated very differently from one another. Mime, the blacksmith/crafty craftsman who’s taken in Siegfried and raised him (and is pretty much just waiting around until he can figure out how to sic Siegfried on the Dragon (we’ll get to him in a minute) and get the Magic Ring back), is costumed as a traditional machinist. It took me a while to work out the costume, so I’d guess it could be a bit clearer (at first, he looked like a steam engine mechanic to me), but ultimately this works for me: Mime furthers the story through his crafty nature and through his craftsmanship and instruction. Albericht, on the other hand, by this point in the Ring story, has been relegated to a second-level guardian of sorts. Fafner the giant, who’s got the Ring, has transformed himself into a Dragon (as you do) and is now guarding the Ring in a cave in the woods somewhere. Albericht, because he knows that eventually someone’s going to come along and try to take the Ring, waits outside the cave, ostensibly with the intention of killing whoever comes for the Ring before they can get to it – or maybe just to make sure that it’s the right person who gets it in the end. You’ll have to ask Wagner which it is. Either way, Conklin costumes him as a Ronin, a samurai without a master but with his own cause.

Fafner and the Dragon present another kind of challenge, which Conklin manages by using traditional Kabuki techniques. The dragon itself is a multi-piece skeleton sculpture manipulated by a crew of 15 (by my count), and once Fafner comes out for his longish singing piece, he stands and delivers downstage from a giant puppet, which acts out the gestures to match his lines. This is traditional Kabuki – the human actor, clad simply (in this case, in a long black asian-influenced coat), stands immediately downstage of his puppet, which is responsible for the brunt of the phyisical representation of the role. The human is the voice, the puppet is the body. This works out particularly well in an opera scenario, where having a singer inside a giant mask is counterproductive to say the least.

Arda is treated a bit differently (refreshingly so) than usual. As the Earth Mother, I’ve most often seen her in forest greens and muddy browns, perhaps with a bit of lichen thrown in for variety or somesuch. This time, though, she rises on a lift from beneath the stage, clad in flowing orange silk robes. This is a different kind of earth mother – not the surface but the fiery center that sleeps beneath it. It’s a brief appearance, but the contrast between her (as representative of the old gods) and Wotan’s current incarnation was stark and telling.

Finally, there’s Siegfried. He’s a bit of a tricky one to pin down – both innocent/wild child/nature boy and hero/heir apparent to Wotan’s power. As I mentioned earlier, the most commonly seen solution is to drape him in wolf pelts and call it a day, and Conklin actually didn’t stray far from this approach. Siegfried is in traditional pastoral fairy tale gear: think cartoon character, even. Complete with little white horn on a thong across his body. The only unfortunate thing about this is that, owing largely to the physicality of the performer, this costume wound up reading not so much as hero as the hero’s lovable sidekick. This was exacerbated by the fact that the Magic Helmet, when he acquired it from Fafner/Dragon, looked like nothing so much as a lovely sequined handbag. I’m feeling magnanimous, though, so I’ll give Conklin the benefit of the doubt here. If he’d had a performer with more decisive movement habits, a more hero-like physique, chances are this costume would have worked out perfectly. Except for the handbag. That was just silly.

Overall, I can see how the production might seem disjointed, even schizophrenic, borrowing elements from all these cultures and mythologies, but I prefer to think of it as a kind of illumination. When you have few aural cues to help you understand what’s happening, when all of the characters are equally important and, in most cases, complex representatives of multiple concepts in multiple stories, these visual cues provide a link to the character’s particular purpose this time around. Entirely aside from which it’s a lot more fun to look at than all-gray-all-the-time, which seems to be a popular design choice for Wagner’s work (see the Lyric’s production of Parsifal, back in 2001-2002). In a world where absolutely everything is abstract, why not use the most evocative abstractions you can think of? Might help. I think it did.

It’s always good to have people in one’s life who have the insight and the balls to point out the obvious, if sometimes unpleasant, truth. Bonus points are given for doing so with humor and a modicum of grace – or at the very least, bourbon. My friend Travis is a wise man, and managed to point out some home truths to me after the hockey last night. To wit:

1. You have no job.
2. You are writing a novel about relationships and dysfunction.
3. You spend a lot of time with your mom.

The conclusion: “If I didn’t know you as well as I do, I would put you down as a bad bet.”

Fair point. Perspective is everything. But it’s not as grim as all that, and I’m not nearly as neurotic as I could be, considering the fact that I really am writing a book about relationships and dysfunction. I’m actually feeling pretty positive about things in general. Of course, this might be taken as further evidence that I’m not at all right in the head, but I of course prefer to interpret it otherwise.

Always possibility
Every moment you don’t think about it
Every moment you’re alive
The lines of your past and your future and your loves and your passions
Are always intersecting
Entwining

That thing that you feel is holding you back?
Look again, it’s holding you up
Only stop straining against it
It is your heart.

‘Nuff said.

Who knew that the local Jewel/Osco was so full of fabulous gift ideas? Yesterday afternoon, I was staggered by the sheer volume of fantastic merchandise, and will therefore take this opportunity to share with you some of my most coveted items:

I’m not entirely sure what this is, but the name is so evocative, so lyrical… I just gotta have some.

What well-appointed bathroom could be complete without the creepy monkey loofah? A must-have for every fashionable household…

I love a good game of cards as much as the next person, but don’t you find the regular decks so, well, bland? A good dose of pink will brighten up any game of Texas Hold ‘Em, and how better than with the queen of all things rosy, Ms. Barbie herself?

And while we’re on the whole poker party subject, I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked on those nights: “Weeza, this is great, but where are the appletinis?” Well, friends, armed with the fabulous stocking of DeKuypers worst poison yummiest elixirs, I’ll be able to whip one up, pronto.

Finally, it’s always so difficult to choose a wall calendar that truly expresses one’s persona. I was tempted initially by the Care Bears calendar down at the Osco, but when I saw this one at my local FedEx drop point, I knew I’d found what I was looking for. Baby animals, posed and terrified-looking – it just doesn’t get a whole lot better than this, folks.

So I don’t want to hear any guff this year about how hard I am to shop for. Capisce?

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! What are you thankful for, this year? Here, I’ll get you started:

1. I’ve got a whole bunch of my favorite people coming over today to hang out and eat and drink and be merry.
2. Nikola got his green card, against all odds. I would have missed him desperately.
3. My life is taking on a whole new shape, and if I play my cards right it will be a shape that I really and truly love.

How about you?