When The Robin Lays His Nest

One of the only operas I've ever seen is Madame Butterfly. It was during my Freshman year of college and it wasn't even live but taped. Pretty much everyone in my Humanities class openly hated it, jeering and laughing the whole way through. They had a point, watching a VHS copy of a staged theatrical event is pretty tedious and hardly a substitute for the real thing. But I remember feeling slightly sad and bitter knowing that all their hearts and minds were closed from the get go*. It was a general elective class meaning everyone had to take it which created a high school like atmosphere. Lots of students who did not want to be there, were. Maybe if they had spoon fed us with Malcom Mclaren's Hip Hopra take things would have worked out better.

Personal highlight: Cho Cho San's modernized lament
"Gotta have something to believe in/ My white honkey, I do miss him"

Wow, and I thought Weezer's Pinkerton album was THE final word on pop culture's reappropriation of Puccini's masterpiece.

* But their hearts and minds were not closed to say Incubus or Dashboard Confessional and often showed up to lecture in pajamas with frappachinos and ringing cellphones in hand. HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Childhood

Plaid Van

There is no shortage of critics who have observed and recorded the dissolution of public discourse in America and its conversion into the arts of show business. But most of them, I believe, have barely begun to tell the story of the origin and meaning of this descent into a vast triviality. Those who have written vigorously on the matter tell us for example, that what is happening is the residue of an exhausted capitalism; or, on the contrary, that it is the tasteless fruit of the maturing capitalism; or that it is the neurotic aftermath of the age of Freud; or the retribution of our allowing God to perish; or that it all comes from old stand bys, greed and ambition.

- excerpt from Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman WRITTEN IN 1985! If only he knew what a prophet he became.



For the record: I enjoy both these shows immensely.

Maggie's Party!

"Whether it is better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool's paradise at Marseilles. Fevered with delusive bliss one hour, suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next. Or to be a school mistress free and honest in a breezy Mountain nook..."

"But you feel solitude an oppression? The little house there behind you is dark and empty."

Green Gay

Why Does This remind me of amateur gay porn?

All it's missing is a creepy off camera voice coaxing them to take their clothes off and questions about their girlfriends.