Chill night-time breezes
Creep through my bedroom window
Whispering winter
31 August 2009
30 August 2009
Ask and Ye Shall Receive, To Some Extent
My statcounter hasn’t been that amusing lately, not that I blame you personally; lots of people just search for my name or reverberate hills, though occasionally I get “reverberant hills” which always surprises me slightly since I’m so used to the original. Take it up with Mr Shakespeare.
My titles get me in trouble sometimes. After I used “Guys Gone Wild” I got a lot of hits from people who were, I fear, disappointed that they ended up with my entry on San Francisco Opera’s last Don Giovanni. But Godspeed, fellas, and good luck on your valiant quest to find those elusive pictures of drunken shirtless frat boys somewhere on the Internet.
I still get quite a few for Go, Lovely Rose, which I used for an entry on Rachel Portman’s operatic version of The Little Prince. I assume these are mostly from students, since they often take the form of “Go Lovely Rose meaning.” To which I have to say – you’re kidding, right? If you can’t figure out what that poem means, you should be out getting your heart broken before you try to read any more poetry. But that’s the problem with teaching literature – most students don’t really understand it at the age when they’re required to read it. You just hope they remember it’s there when they need it later on.
I assume The Bonesetter’s Daughter is now on reading lists as well, since sometimes people just type in what is obviously the teacher’s thought-provoking question. You’d think they would at least rephrase it to shorten what they have to type. The latest was “Who is the antagonist in The Bonesetter’s Daughter?” Well, I guess that would be me, or possibly M. C-.
Narwhal searches show up frequently – apparently there is a paucity of Internet sites featuring narwhals! – and I’m sorry, but I still don’t have any recipes for them. As for the person searching for “the narwhal bacons at midnight, meaning,” I hate to keep apologizing, but I’m sorry, I just don’t think I can help you, even if you switch bacons for either beckons or beacons. Though maybe it really does mean bacons, and as I said, I’m sorry – no recipes, though I imagine anything you use for walrus would also work.
UPDATE: OK, today (August 31) I had a hit for "narwhal kills Aquaman." Cool! When I was young, the only superhero I liked was Aquaman, mostly because he got to live underwater. I also liked that he wore a cool green-and-gold uniform, rather than the usual red, white, and blue. Having him killed by a narwhal just makes a good thing better!
My translation of Hypocrite lecteur – mon semblable – mon frère! continues to be semi-popular, but I’m embarrassed to say I can’t find it now. Yeah, I'm lazy, but it's been that kind of day – I swept the front yard only to have it covered in leaves once again by the time I finished, I did piles of laundry and immediately started filling the laundry basket again, I did the dishes and already more are piled in the sink. So I'll just figure repeating translations is part of the Sisyphean upkeep life requires: Hypocrite reader, my likeness/reflection, my brother!
Now write the rest of the term paper yourself.
I can offer answers to the person who searched for “Pace, pace mio Dio Chinese meaning,” thanks to consultation with my vast international pool of experts (muchas gracias to Mr G/S Y):
If we take the English meaning as “God, please grant me peace,” then the equivalent in Mandarin could be:
Shang-Tian (the Sky/the Heavens), Qing (Please) Tsi Wo (Give Me) He Ping (the Peace)
Now good luck with that audition.
To the searcher for “Nathan Gunn biceps” – oh, can we just call them Nathan’s guns? – I’m sure he has them, but I really don’t have any other information. I also do not have “naked/shirtless pics” of Gunn, Dimitri Hvorostovsky, David Adam Moore, Brandon Jovanovich, or any one of a number of other comely tenors and baritones – but check out this site, I think he can help you.
As for the person who searched for “shirtless Mickey Rooney,” well, I can’t help you, and you may actually be beyond help.
My titles get me in trouble sometimes. After I used “Guys Gone Wild” I got a lot of hits from people who were, I fear, disappointed that they ended up with my entry on San Francisco Opera’s last Don Giovanni. But Godspeed, fellas, and good luck on your valiant quest to find those elusive pictures of drunken shirtless frat boys somewhere on the Internet.
I still get quite a few for Go, Lovely Rose, which I used for an entry on Rachel Portman’s operatic version of The Little Prince. I assume these are mostly from students, since they often take the form of “Go Lovely Rose meaning.” To which I have to say – you’re kidding, right? If you can’t figure out what that poem means, you should be out getting your heart broken before you try to read any more poetry. But that’s the problem with teaching literature – most students don’t really understand it at the age when they’re required to read it. You just hope they remember it’s there when they need it later on.
I assume The Bonesetter’s Daughter is now on reading lists as well, since sometimes people just type in what is obviously the teacher’s thought-provoking question. You’d think they would at least rephrase it to shorten what they have to type. The latest was “Who is the antagonist in The Bonesetter’s Daughter?” Well, I guess that would be me, or possibly M. C-.
Narwhal searches show up frequently – apparently there is a paucity of Internet sites featuring narwhals! – and I’m sorry, but I still don’t have any recipes for them. As for the person searching for “the narwhal bacons at midnight, meaning,” I hate to keep apologizing, but I’m sorry, I just don’t think I can help you, even if you switch bacons for either beckons or beacons. Though maybe it really does mean bacons, and as I said, I’m sorry – no recipes, though I imagine anything you use for walrus would also work.
UPDATE: OK, today (August 31) I had a hit for "narwhal kills Aquaman." Cool! When I was young, the only superhero I liked was Aquaman, mostly because he got to live underwater. I also liked that he wore a cool green-and-gold uniform, rather than the usual red, white, and blue. Having him killed by a narwhal just makes a good thing better!
My translation of Hypocrite lecteur – mon semblable – mon frère! continues to be semi-popular, but I’m embarrassed to say I can’t find it now. Yeah, I'm lazy, but it's been that kind of day – I swept the front yard only to have it covered in leaves once again by the time I finished, I did piles of laundry and immediately started filling the laundry basket again, I did the dishes and already more are piled in the sink. So I'll just figure repeating translations is part of the Sisyphean upkeep life requires: Hypocrite reader, my likeness/reflection, my brother!
Now write the rest of the term paper yourself.
I can offer answers to the person who searched for “Pace, pace mio Dio Chinese meaning,” thanks to consultation with my vast international pool of experts (muchas gracias to Mr G/S Y):
If we take the English meaning as “God, please grant me peace,” then the equivalent in Mandarin could be:
Shang-Tian (the Sky/the Heavens), Qing (Please) Tsi Wo (Give Me) He Ping (the Peace)
Now good luck with that audition.
To the searcher for “Nathan Gunn biceps” – oh, can we just call them Nathan’s guns? – I’m sure he has them, but I really don’t have any other information. I also do not have “naked/shirtless pics” of Gunn, Dimitri Hvorostovsky, David Adam Moore, Brandon Jovanovich, or any one of a number of other comely tenors and baritones – but check out this site, I think he can help you.
As for the person who searched for “shirtless Mickey Rooney,” well, I can’t help you, and you may actually be beyond help.
29 August 2009
El Otro, the Same
Thick House Theater has revived El Otro by Octavio Solis, and for me this sentimental melodrama is their first real misfire since I've started attending their productions. “Sentimental melodrama” may conjure up a Victorian well-made play like Way Down East, but though it is an accurate description, it's not how you experience this drama, which has very fancy ways of telling its very conventional story.
Romy is a 13-year-old girl being picked up from her father Guadalupe (called Lupe) by Ben, her mother Nina’s new husband. Lupe, a drug dealer and general low-life, insists on bringing them to a ranch to give Romy a farewell present. The story is told mostly from Romy’s point of view, which is unfortunate since she’s the least interesting character on stage (and Maria Candelaria looks about ten years older than the rest of her stage family). She takes some peyote before the Dad exchange, which presumably is why she often breaks into less than entirely plausible stagey-poetic stream-of-consciousness monologues that contrast sharply with her normal demotic style of speaking.
Ben (Johnny Moreno, good here and so good in Thick House’s Blade to the Heat, a much more interesting examination of ethnicity and masculinity) is an Army private, a second-generation immigrant Mexican from Chicago who doesn’t speak Spanish. For some reason everyone keeps calling him by a different army title (I think Lieutenant) and he has to keep correcting them. There are some recurring themes and images that develop (for example, dogs, associated with Lupe and his past, and horses, associated with Nina and Ben) but this isn’t one of them.
Another much-repeated bit that goes nowhere is Lupe’s repeated insinuation that Ben wants to molest Romy, which Ben then indignantly denies. There’s no reason to believe this is anything other than Lupe being ugly, so all the repetition does is make you wonder why Ben is putting up with Lupe.
Lupe is presented as sort of a trickster figure, which strikes me as an extremely sentimental approach to someone who is basically a bully and a thug. There are various other attempts to add mythic resonance with various magical-realist elements, but they mostly appear for theatrical effect or to paper over implausibilities. I suppose it’s a tribute to Sean San Jose’s performance as Lupe that it is even slightly plausible that Ben would accompany him, given Lupe’s relentless crude insults and threats. Ben’s motive for going is presumably to protect his Nina’s child, and sure, he’s meant to be slightly passive and safe, but it’s difficult to believe he wouldn’t fight back, and pretty early on too.
All Ben really had to do to win Nina (the appealing Presciliana Esparolini) is deal with some very spicy salsa; after he proves his Mexicanness by eating peppers so hot they make him sweat, she tells him she has a daughter, and the news not only doesn’t scare him off, he determines to be a father to her child. But Romy, in the unoriginal way of children of divorce, resents the interloper, though you’d think she’d be grateful that at least one adult shows some interest in her. Yet she rejects him until his arduous ordeals finally convince her he is worthy of her love.
I find it very strange, and very limiting to the play, that it consistently takes such a superficially adolescent point of view. Ben seems like a stand-up guy, but we're supposed to sympathize with Romy's hostility (if you lose patience with her attitude, then the evening really drags in an irritating way – trust me on this). The emotional focus of the play is Ben winning Romy, not her mother. Romy repeatedly rejects him because he’s “a nerd,” a longing for a cool dad that is difficult to take seriously, especially given Romy’s life with the violent and unstable Lupe.
But this is one of those explorations of ethnicity that insists that the only real experience for its people is as an underclass. You hear about black or Latino school kids saying that studying is for whites and so forth, which strikes me as a tragic example of internalized racism. Yet it's this adolescent point of view that this play embraces in its insistence that Ben must always give way to Lupe, so that he may be purged of his attempts to lead a regular middle-class life and instead be initiated into true Mexicanness.
Because apparently a non-Spanish speaker from Chicago doesn’t count as a real Mexican. Ben must suffer the underclass indignities of the illegal immigrant – a dangerous river crossing, harassment by border patrol, physical violence, and various other trials. You can dress up the humiliation of Ben as a vision quest or a search for an authentic self and toss in all sorts of colorful magical realist bric-a-brac, but not respecting Ben’s experience on its own terms is really no more than a way of insisting that Certain People just don’t belong in Certain Places.
It turns out that the whole thing is based on a passionate love triangle from the past that ended in violence. Nina and Anastasio (who melds with Ben and is played by the same actor) are having an affair. His parents disapprove so they go to Lupe and demand that if he’s a man – if he’s a Mexican – he end things. Not unexpectedly, these taunts lead him to kill Anastasio, and I’m not sure what else the parents expected, though it’s also not entirely clear that they realize their son is dead. They seem to think he's just been otherwise occupied for fourteen years. It’s also not clear why Nina sticks with Lupe for over a decade after he’s killed her true love, or why she’s never told Romy that Anastasio is her biological father (as if it matters; apparently no one here has heard the expression “Your father is the man who raises you” – what an odd faith in bloodlines). Yes, it’s the same old clichéd story – hot-blooded Latins vowing vengeance! killing for honor! Living by a primitive code in a sunbaked land!
There's a lot of yelling and gunfire and blood. You don't even get the payoff of seeing Romy start to move from her adolescent point of view to an adult point of view. It's all just teenage wish fulfillment.
Oh, those Latins! So much passion! So much screaming! So much spicy food!
Romy is a 13-year-old girl being picked up from her father Guadalupe (called Lupe) by Ben, her mother Nina’s new husband. Lupe, a drug dealer and general low-life, insists on bringing them to a ranch to give Romy a farewell present. The story is told mostly from Romy’s point of view, which is unfortunate since she’s the least interesting character on stage (and Maria Candelaria looks about ten years older than the rest of her stage family). She takes some peyote before the Dad exchange, which presumably is why she often breaks into less than entirely plausible stagey-poetic stream-of-consciousness monologues that contrast sharply with her normal demotic style of speaking.
Ben (Johnny Moreno, good here and so good in Thick House’s Blade to the Heat, a much more interesting examination of ethnicity and masculinity) is an Army private, a second-generation immigrant Mexican from Chicago who doesn’t speak Spanish. For some reason everyone keeps calling him by a different army title (I think Lieutenant) and he has to keep correcting them. There are some recurring themes and images that develop (for example, dogs, associated with Lupe and his past, and horses, associated with Nina and Ben) but this isn’t one of them.
Another much-repeated bit that goes nowhere is Lupe’s repeated insinuation that Ben wants to molest Romy, which Ben then indignantly denies. There’s no reason to believe this is anything other than Lupe being ugly, so all the repetition does is make you wonder why Ben is putting up with Lupe.
Lupe is presented as sort of a trickster figure, which strikes me as an extremely sentimental approach to someone who is basically a bully and a thug. There are various other attempts to add mythic resonance with various magical-realist elements, but they mostly appear for theatrical effect or to paper over implausibilities. I suppose it’s a tribute to Sean San Jose’s performance as Lupe that it is even slightly plausible that Ben would accompany him, given Lupe’s relentless crude insults and threats. Ben’s motive for going is presumably to protect his Nina’s child, and sure, he’s meant to be slightly passive and safe, but it’s difficult to believe he wouldn’t fight back, and pretty early on too.
All Ben really had to do to win Nina (the appealing Presciliana Esparolini) is deal with some very spicy salsa; after he proves his Mexicanness by eating peppers so hot they make him sweat, she tells him she has a daughter, and the news not only doesn’t scare him off, he determines to be a father to her child. But Romy, in the unoriginal way of children of divorce, resents the interloper, though you’d think she’d be grateful that at least one adult shows some interest in her. Yet she rejects him until his arduous ordeals finally convince her he is worthy of her love.
I find it very strange, and very limiting to the play, that it consistently takes such a superficially adolescent point of view. Ben seems like a stand-up guy, but we're supposed to sympathize with Romy's hostility (if you lose patience with her attitude, then the evening really drags in an irritating way – trust me on this). The emotional focus of the play is Ben winning Romy, not her mother. Romy repeatedly rejects him because he’s “a nerd,” a longing for a cool dad that is difficult to take seriously, especially given Romy’s life with the violent and unstable Lupe.
But this is one of those explorations of ethnicity that insists that the only real experience for its people is as an underclass. You hear about black or Latino school kids saying that studying is for whites and so forth, which strikes me as a tragic example of internalized racism. Yet it's this adolescent point of view that this play embraces in its insistence that Ben must always give way to Lupe, so that he may be purged of his attempts to lead a regular middle-class life and instead be initiated into true Mexicanness.
Because apparently a non-Spanish speaker from Chicago doesn’t count as a real Mexican. Ben must suffer the underclass indignities of the illegal immigrant – a dangerous river crossing, harassment by border patrol, physical violence, and various other trials. You can dress up the humiliation of Ben as a vision quest or a search for an authentic self and toss in all sorts of colorful magical realist bric-a-brac, but not respecting Ben’s experience on its own terms is really no more than a way of insisting that Certain People just don’t belong in Certain Places.
It turns out that the whole thing is based on a passionate love triangle from the past that ended in violence. Nina and Anastasio (who melds with Ben and is played by the same actor) are having an affair. His parents disapprove so they go to Lupe and demand that if he’s a man – if he’s a Mexican – he end things. Not unexpectedly, these taunts lead him to kill Anastasio, and I’m not sure what else the parents expected, though it’s also not entirely clear that they realize their son is dead. They seem to think he's just been otherwise occupied for fourteen years. It’s also not clear why Nina sticks with Lupe for over a decade after he’s killed her true love, or why she’s never told Romy that Anastasio is her biological father (as if it matters; apparently no one here has heard the expression “Your father is the man who raises you” – what an odd faith in bloodlines). Yes, it’s the same old clichéd story – hot-blooded Latins vowing vengeance! killing for honor! Living by a primitive code in a sunbaked land!
There's a lot of yelling and gunfire and blood. You don't even get the payoff of seeing Romy start to move from her adolescent point of view to an adult point of view. It's all just teenage wish fulfillment.
Oh, those Latins! So much passion! So much screaming! So much spicy food!
28 August 2009
Haiku 240
(scenes from public transportation)
Heads nodding in time
Two boys (one black, one white) share
A single iPod
*******
(a dramatic monologue in 17 syllables)
There's a bleeding wound
In my heart that bears your name:
Thank you, I suppose
Heads nodding in time
Two boys (one black, one white) share
A single iPod
*******
(a dramatic monologue in 17 syllables)
There's a bleeding wound
In my heart that bears your name:
Thank you, I suppose
Remember when we would never forget?
San Francisco Symphony is presenting a free public concert at Justin Herman Plaza on the Embarcadero, featuring Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No 1, Rodgers' Carousel Waltz, and Ravel's La Valse. This delightfully swoony festival in 3/4 time will be held on September 11, a date that doesn't seem to have rung any bells over at the symphony.
27 August 2009
26 August 2009
25 August 2009
Philadelphia 16: neighborhoods
Some travelers speak scornfully of tourists and their touristy places. I don't. To me it seems fairly arrogant to assume I'm going to grasp the true native essence of a place in a few days. I mean, I'm not sure I do that in places where I've lived for decades.
On the other hand, when I had to transverse Fisherman's Wharf to get to Fort Mason for L'Amico Fritz, I saw the advantage of avoiding the more nakedly awful touristy places.
But when I travel I do tend to spend most of my time walking among museums, churches, theaters, and historic sites. Those are tourist places in the sense that people go to cities specifically to see them, and the natives rarely bother, even when that's what the city is famous for.
Thanks to my friends Arby and L (with their adorable almost-two-year-old daughter) we spent one of my few sunny afternoons in Philly in another neighborhood I wouldn't normally have seen, though I'm not sure exactly which neighborhood it was. It was a place where the people who live in a city live, and mostly you would have no reason to go there unless you knew them, as we didn't. But we were looking for the Dock Street Brewing Company, and that brought us there. I like beer, but I don't claim Arby's expertise, but I knew I could trust it.
The neighborhood looked a bit dicey to me, but, as I realized when I went to Baltimore several years ago, I, as a native Californian, have trouble reading eastern cities. So much of my state was built up after World War II that when I see solid brownstoned streets I immediately assume I'm in Edith Wharton territory. This isn't always where I am. And I don't have a sense honed from childhood of where exactly I really am, sociologically. This is occasionally a problem.
I've known easterners who can barely bring themselves to call Houston a city. I see why, from their point of view, but to me it looks like Mountain View in Silicon Valley, only inflated. When I visited Houston, I had the opera house about ten minutes to the left of my hotel, and the baseball stadium about ten minutes to the right, and in between was a light rail that took me to the Museum of Fine Arts and (after a short walk) the various building of the de Menil collection. So I considered it a fine city, at least for a visit.
The area around the Dock Street Brewery appeared to be a mixture of lower middle-class black families and young white hipsters, though I have no idea if it's always been like that (whatever always means in American cities) or if it's gentrifying. Once we were out of the car it felt like a much better place to be, which is not always the case.
The brewery is in a handsome building, with outdoor seating that was ruined by smokers.
On the other hand, when I had to transverse Fisherman's Wharf to get to Fort Mason for L'Amico Fritz, I saw the advantage of avoiding the more nakedly awful touristy places.
But when I travel I do tend to spend most of my time walking among museums, churches, theaters, and historic sites. Those are tourist places in the sense that people go to cities specifically to see them, and the natives rarely bother, even when that's what the city is famous for.
The first two shots here are near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, going away from the Square and towards the science museums. This is a part of Philly that reminds me of Beacon Hill, which is also full of three-story nineteenth-century brick houses on tree-lined streets. I used to live on Beacon Hill, but my horrible little dark apartment next to the burnt-out building was not at all what you might think of if you only knew that I used to live on Beacon Hill.
There was a young teenager playing baseball by himself on this street, and I tried to take a picture of that (a boy playing baseball on those leafy streets just looked so iconically American to me) but when you play baseball by yourself you have to run after the ball yourself, trot back, toss it up in the air, hit it, and then chase after it again, and that takes kind of a long time and I was starting to feel a bit creepy waiting for him to strike the right pose, so I walked on. But that was his life in his hometown.
Thanks to my friends Arby and L (with their adorable almost-two-year-old daughter) we spent one of my few sunny afternoons in Philly in another neighborhood I wouldn't normally have seen, though I'm not sure exactly which neighborhood it was. It was a place where the people who live in a city live, and mostly you would have no reason to go there unless you knew them, as we didn't. But we were looking for the Dock Street Brewing Company, and that brought us there. I like beer, but I don't claim Arby's expertise, but I knew I could trust it.
The neighborhood looked a bit dicey to me, but, as I realized when I went to Baltimore several years ago, I, as a native Californian, have trouble reading eastern cities. So much of my state was built up after World War II that when I see solid brownstoned streets I immediately assume I'm in Edith Wharton territory. This isn't always where I am. And I don't have a sense honed from childhood of where exactly I really am, sociologically. This is occasionally a problem.
I've known easterners who can barely bring themselves to call Houston a city. I see why, from their point of view, but to me it looks like Mountain View in Silicon Valley, only inflated. When I visited Houston, I had the opera house about ten minutes to the left of my hotel, and the baseball stadium about ten minutes to the right, and in between was a light rail that took me to the Museum of Fine Arts and (after a short walk) the various building of the de Menil collection. So I considered it a fine city, at least for a visit. 
The area around the Dock Street Brewery appeared to be a mixture of lower middle-class black families and young white hipsters, though I have no idea if it's always been like that (whatever always means in American cities) or if it's gentrifying. Once we were out of the car it felt like a much better place to be, which is not always the case.
The brewery is in a handsome building, with outdoor seating that was ruined by smokers. 
Since I will often order something based on its name, I had Man Full O' Trouble porter, which I recommend, and then later I had a porter (I think it was another porter) that had coffee in it, which is a surprisingly good combination. Beer plus coffee seems to be sort of a thing now, since The Thirsty Bear in San Francisco had the same combo last time I was there. I can't drink coffee normally, but fortunately for me I can take it in beer or ice cream form.
We had pizza with our beers, which was very good, though I forgot to tell them to go light on the cheese. But I've never had a bad meal in a brew pub.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)