Monday Therapy: Literature Hath Charms ...

It's not just music that hath charms to soothe a savage breast!  Literature can too.  Since Mondays are by nature savage, let's see if we can get some literary therapy to take the edge off the day.

I think a whole lot of people would be much more interested in lit if we got more wonderful people to do more poetry readings.  I don't even really LIKE e.e. cummings, subject of the first reading, but the reading is remarkable.  Reading is a performing art, all right.  Let's start, shall we?

Happy 449th Birthday, Will Shakespeare!

Join the fun with the third annual Happy Birthday, Shakespeare online project sponsored by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and remember that it's also Talk Like Shakespeare Day!  You can join your fellow fans on Twitter all day long with the #happybirthdayshakespeare hashtag too.

Happy birthday indeed to the sweet swan of Avon, who has given me so much pleasure from the first moment I met him in a children's storybook to right now, when every re-reading of every play yields something fresh and new and wonderful.  The haters can hate all they want; Shakespeare is immortal.

For the quote of the day, I'll give you Ben Jonson's poem "To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us" and its peerless assessment that Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time.

Rant: Poverty and Cultural Authenticity

Short version: you don't need the former in order to have the latter.

So tell me, ye judges of authenticity: am I "authentic" enough for you?  Maybe my smartphone and laptop and high heels disqualify me as a "proper" Taiwanese.  Should I be back wading in the rice paddy and wearing a coolie hat with a baby strapped to my back?  Does that better meet your laughably ignorant expectations?  Would it make you feel better if all the businesspeople and computer engineers of Taipei knock down the high-rises and go back to living in villages?  trade in their cars for wagons and water buffalo again?  ARE WE ANY LESS TAIWANESE BECAUSE WE'RE NOT POOR?  How insulting.

Oh, and heaven forbid that anyone say that the greater issue is whether quality of life is better.  Let me tell you: on my last visit to "the old country," one of my elderly aunts started telling me about life 50 years ago when she knew that "culturally authentic" poverty firsthand.  I won't weary you with details; suffice it to say it was horrifying and included phrases like "no running water" and "no indoor plumbing."  Then she smiled, gestured around her comfortable modern home, and said, well, thank goodness that's all over with!  Indeed.

Lord, give me patience with those horrible people who argue about "authenticity" ... or, better yet, Lord, give me the self-control not to punch them in the face.  Why, one might even think the authenticity police's breathtakingly arrogant behavior is ... raaaaaaaaaaacist or something.

OK, OK, how about something like this for a solution?  Wealthy tourists want to see "authenticity" from the ethnic locals while the ethnic locals want a better life with modern advances.  Why not take a hint from the brilliant Gary Larson's cartoon?  

You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream For Edvard Munch

Dude needs a better museum?

Monday Therapy: "I Am European"

If you need a good laugh on this stormy Monday, you'll appreciate this uproariously, fall-on-the-floor-and-choke-with-laughter awful music video.  Come on, why are all EU propaganda videos so darn horrible?  Just how bad is it?  So bad that it got an eminent British member of the European Parliament to call it "an abomination" and to tag it on his blog as "terrifyingly crappy video."  Take a look for yourself and ponder whether this is as bad as the hilarrible "Science: It's A Girl Thing!" video.

Good grief, people, don't you realize that name-checking a bunch of European cultural giants only makes you look even smaller and sillier?  I know, it's hardly fair to make fun of the EU's propaganda wing.  Talk about a "target-rich environment"! It's like shooting fish in a barrel.  It's not even sporting. I was, though, rather tickled to see Reagan there giving his famous Berlin Wall speech.  Is there some tiny, grudging acknowledgment of the fact that yes indeed, the Gipper helped the free world win the Cold War?  Haters gonna hate, but Reagan rocked.

50 Years of Shakespeare in the Park

Half a century of glorious (and free) Shakespeare in the summer and the open air.  Here's a nice comment by one of the artistic directors:

"It was the idea that culture in a democracy should be the property of all the people," [Oskar] Eustis says, "regardless of their educational attainment, regardless of their financial status or class status — that everybody had the right to own the best that our culture had to offer. And it's a beautiful vision that still lives."

*kisses for the Swan of Avon*

The Pop Culture War: Hollywood Vs. the Internet

Hint: the Internet is winning.

String Theory: Violins and Mad Cow Disease

I don't even know what to say to this:

Musicians have warned that the works of Purcell, Handel, Vivaldi and Bach may never again be heard as their composers intended – because of EU rules to stop people catching "mad cow disease" from their instruments. 

Regulations which tightly control the use of certain types of animal tissue are unwittingly threatening the centuries-old technique of making musical instrument strings out of beef gut. 

The craft is covered by the same strict controls on raw materials from cows, even though campaigners say that to catch Creutzfeldt – Jakob disease, (CJD) – the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy – from violin or cello strings from an infected animal you would need to eat several metres of them.

I do think the word "unwittingly" is all too accurate.  Anyway, have you ever heard of anyone trying to eat violin strings? I mean, I know there's that romantic stereotype of "the starving artist," but this is ridiculous.

Nerd Fun: Literature Map!

Try this!

Quote of the Day: Picasso on Artists & Himself

Hmmmm:

Many of us continue being artists for reasons that have very little to do with real art, but rather for the sake of imitation, for nostalgia of tradition, because of inertia, love of ostentation, luxury, intellectual curiosity, to be fashionable, or by calculation. Such artists survive because of habit, snobbery, the recent past; but the great majority of artists in all the fields of art lack a sincere passion for art, which they consider a pastime, a relaxation, an ornament. 

Oh, snap!  Even more striking, though, may be Picasso's comments about himself and his own art:

Amusing myself with these games, the squiggles, the jigsaw puzzles, the riddles and arabesques, I quickly became famous. And celebrity for the artist means sales, commissions, fortune, wealth. 

Now, as you know, I am famous and rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to consider myself an artist in the grand old sense of the word. 

There have been great painters like Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya. I am nothing but a public buffoon who understood his times. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may seem, but it has the merit of being sincere.

I've never liked Picasso's art so much, though he deserves some props for honesty in his self-critique and he certainly made a splash in art history with Cubism. I don't like modern art in general. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya, though ... Beautiful.  I'm a young woman with old tastes, I suppose!

10 Operas You Didn't Know You Already Like

Well, whaddyaknow?

Freedom and the Greek Inheritance

Here are some interesting thoughts from French philosopher Andre Gluckmann.

UNESCO Recognizes More Cultural Contributions

Here's the list of additions to the catalog of recognized cultural heritage events/objects/practices.  Some are simply, hilariously, gloriously quirky.  Three cheers for Turkey's Kirkpinar oil wrestling festival!  Huzzah for Luxembourg's "hopping procession of Echternach"!

Friday Fun Video: Philly Flash Mob Sings "Hallelujah Chorus"

Outstanding!  Just as much fun is the title of the video: "Random Act of Culture."  Who couldn't use a bit more lovely music in a day?  Besides, Handel is far too good to be heard only at Christmas.  Video via Assistant Village Idiot.

Forever and ever.

American Literature Smackdown: Flannery O'Connor 1, Harper Lee 0

From this piece about Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird:

In all great novels there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained. One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship between Tom and Huck, or why Gatsby gazed at that green light at the end of the dock across the harbor. There is no ambiguity in "To Kill a Mockingbird"; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad. As Thomas Mallon wrote in a 2006 story in The New Yorker, the book acts as "an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious."

It's time to stop pretending that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is some kind of timeless classic that ranks with the great works of American literature. Its bloodless liberal humanism is sadly dated, as pristinely preserved in its pages as the dinosaur DNA in "Jurassic Park."

Harper Lee's contemporary and fellow Southerner Flannery O'Connor (and a far worthier subject for high-school reading lists) once made a killing observation about "To Kill a Mockingbird": "It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they are reading a children's book."

Fifty years later, we can concede both that Harper Lee's novel inspired a generation of adolescents and that Flannery O'Connor was right. 

All right, then.  I had always thought that To Kill a Mockingbird was too preachy -- one big sermon.   (I've also always thought it'd be fun to open a bar and name it Tequila Mockingbird, but that's something else entirely.)

A Little Shakespeare On Mother's Day For La Parisienne

All right, maybe I simply have a perverse and wicked sense of humor. On this Mother's Day, I give you the famous "queen's closet" scene from "Hamlet."

Mother's Day in Elsinore must have been murder!

The volcanic confrontation between Hamlet and his mother occurs in Act 3, Scene 4 (text here), and the performance is by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with David Tennant as Hamlet and Penny Downie as Queen Gertrude.

Take a look at the opening salvo:

Queen Gertrude: Why, how now, Hamlet!

Hamlet: What's the matter now?

Queen Gertrude: Have you forgot me?

Hamlet: No, by the rood, not so:
You are the queen, your husband's brother's wife;
And -- would it were not so! -- you are my mother.

What follows is either scenery-chewing melodrama (if performed badly) or (if done well) sublimely modulated personal trauma of a once-loving relationship now destroyed, and I wouldn't give you a bad performance. Pay attention to how Tennant can turn on a dime where wildly conflicting emotions are involved and swing back and forth from an almost demonic energy to near-total prostration; it's an impressive performance indeed. Downie's Gertrude is fantastic too.

Part One:




Part Two:

Nerd Fun, Shakespeare Edition: Film Versions of Hamlet's "To Be Or Not To Be" Speech

I am still obsessing about the Patrick Stewart/David Tennant version of "Hamlet" that aired a few nights ago on PBS (you can see the whole glorious thing online now at PBS), and I was also mentally comparing this film version to all the other film versions of "Hamlet" that I've seen.

It's been very interesting, so I thought I'd share my nerdy pleasures with you, O gentle reader. I can't link to all the films in their entirety, so I've given you just the "to be or not to be" speech.

What do you make of these different actors as they tackle this famous soliloquy?

David Tennant (2009/2010)




Sir Laurence Oliver (1948)




Richard Burton (1964)




Mel Gibson (1990)




Kenneth Branagh (1996)




Ethan Hawke (2000)



I would be remiss, though, if I did not give you the entire text of the speech itself:

To be, or not to be : that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.

(I dedicate this post to those lovelies La Parisienne and California Dreamer -- fellow fans of Shakespeare and David Tennant alike!)

Oh, I can't help myself. Here's more nerdy fun with (Sir!) Patrick Stewart:



UPDATE 1: I nearly forgot to remind you of this! Or this.

UPDATE 2: La Parisienne, this one's for you.

Nerd Journal: I Apparently Have No Taste in Music. Or Opera. Whatever.

Not, you understand, that I'm either ashamed of the fact or apologizing!

The Opera Diva emailed me some lovely music files of herself singing parts of arias from some German and Italian operas. She's got a lovely voice. But I just wasn't in the mood. To be perfectly honest, I'm never in the mood for opera. In fact (and don't ever tell her this), I kinda hate opera. I went right back to what I was listening to at the time. Van Halen. Yup. The Opera Diva might want Wagner, but I want Van Halen. The music is hilarious! Plus it keeps you energized.

Maybe I should feel something, some shred or tinge of embarrassment, but I got nothin'. And why should anybody ever be ashamed of what they honestly like or don't like? There's too much pretentious posing as it is. Crank up the volume, gentle readers, and let the big-hair rock-n-roll play on!

(And, yes, I still like some awesome Pat Benatar.)

Poetry for the New Year

I won't quite admit to feeling remorseful for starting off the new year with the mouthless feline horror, but I will amend it with something more literary. Here is some lovely poetry from the UK, fitting for the end of the old and the start of the new. From Brits at Their Best, here is a bit of Tennyson:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas 2009 from MM Blog!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Song of the Angels (1881)

For your continued holiday pleasure, I give you this fantastic little video of the most famous portion of Handel's glorious "Messiah." It combines both that beautiful music and a charming sense of humor: