| (no subject) |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|09:24 am] |
It's Chanukah. Which according to a lecture I attended last week on 1 and 2 Maccabee and how to interpret them, may have actually been a festival celebrating the end of a Jewish civil war over who would rule over the Temple and how far assimilation would be allowed by the religious authorities. The fanatics were the victors.
We Jews... we like to think we're better than the gentiles. We like to think we're immune to the sort of chaotic, soul destroying schisms that racked the Christian church, immune to waging holy war on heretics. We like to think the tension between Orthodox and Reform Jews is a petty and annoying sibling rivalry, not anything truly serious. It's not true. Jewish exceptionalism doesn't cover everything we wish it did. And the things they taught you in Hebrew school don't encompass the whole of the Jewish experience.
I wrote a post for a Jewish fandom community last week about the challenges of being a Jew at a Con, and the most challenging thing was figuring out how to frame it in a way that was inclusive to all types of Jewish experience. I actually heard the lecture on Chanukah twice, once to a mostly Modern Orthodox crowd and then to a Conservative crowd, and it was fascinating to hear the subtle self-edits the speaker made to tailor the lecture to the different crowds.
I feel a kinship to all Jews, but finding common ground can be a challenge, across the incredibly broad spectrum of ideas we call Judaism. Judaism isn't a proselytizing religion, which means that all of the Jews with the missionary tendency go into kiruv, usually translated as outreach, which involves trying to convert Jews into Jews. I am not quite a Baal Teshuvah (One who Repents, often colloquially called Born Again Jews), but I was strongly influenced by a pair of kiruv Rabbis when I was a teenager. So I sometimes have to fight against a tendency toward outreach, toward including less religious Jews in my rituals not to share something beautiful but to try to bring them closer to my practice.
So I decree: The Shabbat dinner I will be hosting on Christmas this year, which will feature a spectrum of Jews from people at my observance level to people who don't feel any connection to Judaism as a religion, will be as multidenominational* as I can make it. It will be dedicated, in opposition to the spirit of Chanukah, to figuring out how to find accommodation between people with genuine and significant differences of both opinion and practice without enmity, without hatred, but with pure Ahavas Yisroel.
It might not actually be the true Spirit of Chanukah, but I really don't think God would mind too much.
*Multidenominational. Not Pandenominational or Nondenominational, which I figure are both different kinds of Nothing. The trick is to do this without diluting anyone's belief system. |
|
|
| A Conversation in All-Caps |
[Dec. 6th, 2009|08:46 pm] |
(8:20:11 PM) ME!!!: THANK YOU!!!
(8:23:48 PM) Ryuu: FOR WHAT
(8:23:54 PM) Ryuu: IS THIS ABOUT THAT BOOK
(8:23:55 PM) Ryuu: WE FOUND
(8:24:00 PM) ME!!!: FOR JEWISH PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN!!!!!
(8:24:02 PM) Ryuu: OH YES
(8:24:04 PM) Ryuu: YOU ARE WELCOME
(8:24:10 PM) Ryuu: HUMZA AND I WERE LIKE "GOOD GOD"
(8:24:14 PM) Ryuu: "WE HAVE TO BUY THIS JUST TO BUY THIS"
(8:24:23 PM) Ryuu: "LETS GIVE IT TO FERRET"
(8:24:28 PM) Ryuu: "FLAWLESS PLAN"
(8:24:44 PM) ME!!!: I LOVE IT SO MUCH. I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT IT FROM THE TYPO IN THE TABLE OF CONTENTS TO THE WEIRDLY ITALICIZED WORD REVENGE ON THE COVER.
(8:25:28 PM) Ryuu: I AM VERY GLAD ^^
(8:25:55 PM) ME!!!: AND THE OMG THE PIRATE RABBI!!!! :D :D :D :D
(8:29:28 PM) Ryuu: I HAVE NOT READ IT SO I DON'T KNOW, BUT I AM PLEASED TO KNOW THAT PIRATE RABBIS EXIST
(8:29:34 PM) Ryuu: THIS MAKES MY UNIVERSE BETTER
(8:29:38 PM) ME!!!: ME TOO |
|
|
| The Hazards of Love by the Decemberists |
[Dec. 3rd, 2009|04:55 pm] |
Michelle daringly recommended another Decemberists' album after the cold reception "Picaresque" drew from me. I wasn't sure what to expect from the experience, and I was hesitant at the start, but the Hazards of Love was an album I did slowly warm to. It is closer to the mental picture I had of the Decemberists before I'd listened to any of their music. It is a richer narrative experience than Picaresque, it is musically a more dynamic album, and it has themes and characters I found interesting. There is still a hesitation to give the album a full-throated affirmation, though. Something about the album, which I can't put words to, keeps me at arm's length.
-The Hazards of Love is a full-fledged, mostly coherent rock opera. It has a single plot which is pretty easily discerned through the lyrics, with a vivid cast of characters- the innocent young Margaret, her lover William, who is the shape-changing son of a magical Forest Queen, and the villainous Rake. And the adventure they go through, of the discovery of love, the rebellion and triumph and loss and final, tainted acceptance, is heavy. And lord knows I love ambition in my music. I love it when art tries to tackle themes too big for itself.
-While I was stuck on the album's themes, I requested and received a little bit of fiction featuring William and Margaret. This is ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) nextian's beautiful story about what comes next. It's so, so good and it really illuminated the story's 'happy ending' very clearly for me.
-There is something very, very wrong about the conception of love that all of the characters are operating under. The Queen has the idea of love as an obligation on the loved which must somehow be "repaid". Her partner in mischief the Rake has an idea of love as being entirely without obligations. But they're not what the story is about, and I think in some ways their ghastliness masks the more obscure obscenity of our central lovers. For Margaret and William, love is that feeling so strong that nothing can stand in the way of it. And that is its own kind of psychosis. And nextian understands that psychosis in a very powerful way when she opens her story with "You are thirteen." Margaret and William's love is the love of two immature teenagers, she suggests. It's not a model to be emulated, and the album is not about the triumph of two lovers over the hazards in their path, but about the way love itself throws hazards in your path that require experience and honesty to overcome.
-I've been sitting on these words for weeks now, blocking further progress on AotW. I know I have more to say, but I don't know what it is. It's a big, impressive album and I think you have to listen to it many times to have any sense of what it's trying to do. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 2nd, 2009|10:11 am] |
Do you see this square old yellow Book, I toss
I' the air, and catch again, and twirl about
By the crumpled vellum covers, — pure crude fact
Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard,
And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since ? |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|11:15 pm] |
1) My NaNoWriMo novel hit 50,000 words! Go me! It is by no means 'done', but the chapter I wrote to top 50,000 was designed so that it could sort of provide closure, because I don't expect to get much more writing on this done until probably February. Now my attention turns to Yuletide and more importantly, HUNTHUNTHUNT.
2)The Larry Sanders Show is now on Hulu. Rock.
3)I had a pretty good Thanksgiving. How was yours?
4)Anybody know where the Giants can find a secondary? Anybody? |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Nov. 24th, 2009|11:04 am] |
You know, I never wrote about the New York City Opera's Don Giovanni, which I attended last weekend.
-First, the renovations. The David Koch Theater, which I keep thinking of as the New York State Theater because name changes rarely sink in immediately, is really nice. It's a genuinely pleasant place to see a show. They removed some seats, I believe, and the result is extraordinary leg room and comfortable seating. We were seated all the way at the back of the orchestra and had a clear view of the stage and excellent sound quality. I do recommend going to a show there.
-Now, the opera. It's Mozart, so it's just about impossible for me to have a completely negative report. The music is unspeakably wonderful. The singers were good, faithful to the music, emotive, and in some places they turned it up a notch. Zerlina's second act aria was particularly powerful, I thought. Tender and loving and absolutely romantic.
-But the staging was... puzzling. The show opened with the whole cast, ensemble and leads, seated and motionless in two rows of chairs on a bare stage, with Don Giovanni masked and seated apart in the foreground, as the overture played. A large neon cross overlooked the scene. We couldn't decide if the scene was intended to suggest a Church, a trial, or an execution. It might have been something altogether different. I... just don't know. As the overture ended, Don Giovanni stood up to begin singing, and the various leads arose from their chairs as their music began, but everyone else remained seated and frozen through the opening scene. I could not make out the message this was suggesting at all. It was just mystifying.
There were some good things. The bacchanalia at the end of Act I was weird and ludicrous and oddly sensual, full of flashing lights and herky-jerky dancing. The second Act, staged almost entirely (though at times implausibly) at the Commendatore's funeral, was barebones and low on spectacle but attractive and offering plenty of breathing room for the various arias.
On the whole though, I felt like there was something I was missing here. The ensemble use in general, with weird choreographed shunnings and a variety of actions that were not responsive at all to the plots the main characters were going through, just drew a blank for me. It didn't make any sense at all. And the showy use of lighting, from the neon cross to an obvious shift from cool fluorescent-y lighting to warm incandescent-y lighting after Don Giovanni's death, seemed to suggest a vision of Don Giovanni's influence and presence that I found bizarrely pre-Modern.
What does it mean that the lights go warm after Don Giovanni descends to Hell? Did his mere presence cast such a pall(or) on the proceedings that normal life couldn't go on until he was killed? Was there some mystical influence of Don Giovanni that was responsible for the straying of the other characters, and which his death frees them from? I don't like any of these answers.
And in general, I didn't feel like I had a strong sense of who the characters were beyond Don Giovanni and Leporello. The other leads sang beautifully and with emotion, so I think this was a failure of direction rather than of performance. It wasn't that I thought the characters seemed like stick figures. To the contrary, every aria was sung with color and depth. It was just that in the aftermath, trying to piece out who they were by connecting the dots between scenes... there was a lack of coherence. The Zerlina that showed up in one scene didn't feel related to the Zerlina of another.
-NaNoWriMo wordcount at 41,396. I can do this! |
|
|
| In Defense of Eric Holder |
[Nov. 19th, 2009|05:16 pm] |
Probability of getting a conviction should not be the standard by which we decide whether military tribunals are the measure of American justice. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|02:53 pm] |
Ok, GI Joe, my last yuletide fandom. So the thing about GI Joe is that I read the comic in the early 90s, when the comic was lame as hell. The Cold War had ended and the whole GI Joe vs. Cobra thing had stopped making sense. There were plots about ecoterrorists and the GI Joe helping in the War on Drugs. It all made little sense and led to furious fan letters every month.
Cobra Island had just fallen. Cobra Commander was more or less out of the picture for the moment. He was still around, at least, and he still sometimes did badass things, but he wasn't this looming evil mastermind. So there really wasn't a lot for me to grab on to. I'm kind of mystified, looking back, that I was so enthralled.
And yet there were things about the comic that were still amazing. The lull allowed the writers to really explore the Ninjas in detail, and the GI Joe Ninja storylines are awesome. I can never get enough of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, how they were once as close as brothers and yet they can now fight each other with lethal intensity. And each of them is amazing on their own, Snake Eyes the beloved teammate who still stands aloof and holds his own counsel; Storm Shadow the perpetual traitor who, even when he leads a Cobra or Joe team to success, is looked at with suspicion by both sides. Supreme warriors who took different paths.
Firefly! I must have memorized the vast majority of the issue where Firefly tells his life story to a bunch of Cobra ninjas. It's a tour de force of bad comic book tropes, retconning pretty much every significant event in GI Joe history to involve Firefly in one disguise or another. I think my favorite bit is the idea that Firefly was the Faceless Master through some sort of hypnotic trickery. I think the only way to rationalize that issue is to say that every other word out of Firefly's mouth was a lie.
The glory of GI Joe is supervillains more ridiculous than Batman, technology crazier than Stargate, characters more hackneyed and stereotyped than ANYTHING... it's action figures brought to life. It is a preposterous amount of fun.
I know I specified 4 characters, but I don't expect them all to appear if you're writing this request. Pick the ones that make sense to work with. If you include two of the four I'll be happy. And please don't let Scarlett end up with Duke. She's too good for him. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|09:10 am] |
What moves me in the Marriage of Figaro:
1)The music. Duh, but let's go beyond the duh. The Overture is of course astounding. Dramatic, fiery, moving, intensely memorable. We all know that I'm obsessed with the East Village Opera Company's Who-influenced version of the tune, but that doesn't diminish at all my affection for the fully orchestrated original. The counting duet that opens the opera and tells you that we're going to see lively creativity throughout. Multiple all-stops-out arias for Rosina that just knock you out. Figaro's craftiness as something more serious and substantial than Rossini, merely on the strength of Mozart's musical characterization.
2) Cherubino. Mozart and da Ponte let Cherubino occupy a world between masculine and feminine as comfortably (and uncomfortably) as anybody since Shakespeare's Viola. He gets tender love duets, mezzo with soprano. And he gets the masculine song of marching off to war. His evolution over the story is the most dynamic, and therefore the most unnecessary to the comic plot. But it enriches the story's sense of theme to an untold degree.
3) Rosina. She has the best music in the show, the most dramatic moments, and ultimately it's she who saves the marriage of Figaro. She emerges from the girlish figure of "The Barber of Seville" into a woman, confident, alive, sexy, mature, intelligent. She is confined by her countess-ship, but she is also empowered by it. And it is undoubtedly her influence that shapes Susannah into a thoughtful, sensitive young woman, making her so much more than the echo Strauss creates in Der Rosenkavalier's Sophie.
4)I like to joke that the point of "Se Vuol Ballare" is to suggest that what the opera needs is an electric guitar. But it's a favorite aria of mine for other reasons. Where in music do we see such joyful subterfuge, such pleasure in the art of mind to mind combat? Figaro winding himself up for the fight, confident in his intelligence overcoming Almaviva's power imbalance. And even though he oversteps himself this time and needs rescue, Figaro never loses that strut. I adore him for it. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|09:04 am] |
I may have mentioned that I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year. Last year, I ended up with 26,000 words in my Wacky Stealth Ninja novel. This year, I'm writing a novel set entirely in a traffic jam. It's going quite well. 18,000+ words so far, some great characters. I think I'm in good shape to hit 50,000 this year. And I've been going to write-ins, which is awesome. I'm not used to having a social life this local.
I also signed up for Yuletide. I'm not really sure why, but somehow the opportunity to possibly write A Mighty Wind or Snarkout Boys fanfic that somebody would actually read proved compelling.
They suggest that people put some notes somewhere about what you would like in the fandoms you requested, so the writer has an idea of what I'd like to see. It's a gift exchange, which has me mildly uncomfortable with its Christian overtones, but eh... ridiculous fanfic! So...
Dear Person As Crazy As Me,
I want to emphasize above all else that what I really want is to be surprised. I want to see something that I never dreamed possible. If you have an idea that you think would be cool but probably won't work, give it a try anyway. I am notorious among my friends for having bad taste.
The things I scribbled in the prompts are suggestions at best, things pinging back and forth wildly in my brain. If one of them moves you, that's awesome. If they don't, go ahead and write what inspires you.
Keywords about the Fandoms:
GI Joe comics
Keywords: Explosions, Ninjas, COBRA, Funny Costumes
Italo Calvino - If on a winters night a traveler
Keywords: Metafiction, love triangles, metafanfiction
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
Keywords: Philosophy, Judaism, Immigrants, Maturity, Hope
Mozart- The Marriage of Figaro
Keywords: Music, Deception, Sexism, Genderbending
Also, I have written in the past on this journal about some of these fandoms, and I may be inspired in the next few days to write more about the other two fandoms. [Edit: Some text on the other fandoms can be found under my yuletide tag]
First Review of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Second Review of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Commentary on East of Eden
With Gratitude,
~Ferret |
|
|
| World Series |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|11:23 am] |
Idle musings on the Yankees 27th World Series Championship.
-Ha! Ken has to buy Steve a milkshake!
-This championship was won on pitching. Cliff Lee was the only reason the Phillies were competitive at all. Sabathia, Burnett, and Pettitte were the reason Lee wasn't enough.
-I still don't know how I feel about ARod, but the smile on his face as he hoisted that trophy seemed surprisingly genuine. Man... 15 years in the league. I still remember skinny 19 year old Alex Rodriguez on the 1995 Mariners team that beat us in the Division Series, this little kid who wasn't there yet but was damned sure on his way. Good on him for finally winning a Series. Good on him for finally hitting in the clutch. He's a complicated figure, one I should probably give a more sophisticated exegesis to in the near future, but... there are parts of his game that you have to respect tremendously. He's a craftsman, an artisan, when it comes to baseball.
-My feelings on Matsui are far less ambiguous. He's been one of my favorite Yankees since he joined the team. I've been screaming all series that Girardi should have figured out a way to play him in Philadelphia, that the Yankees could have used his bat. I'm glad he proved me right in Game 6.
-I think when they hoist the banner next spring, it'll go a hell of a long way toward making the new stadium really feel legitimate. And that bothers me to a certain extent, but after all, isn't HISTORY the thing that I felt was missing from the new Yankee Stadium? You can't manufacture history, but 6 RBI World Series games do help.
-My dad and I have argued about Andy Pettitte for years. My dad thinks he's a choker, too soft to get the really tough outs. He thinks Torre coddled him for years, giving him opportunities he didn't deserve. For my part, I've watched his steely focus in playoff season after playoff season and have long had faith in his ability to deliver and faith in his cut-fastball. Last night, on three days rest Andy Pettitte delivered. The guy is unquestionably the greatest Yankee pitcher of my lifetime.
-This wasn't the delirious glee I felt over the '96 or '98 World Series wins. I'm no longer the giddy teenager I was then, and I've seen enough failure and success to have a more tempered response. I'm fairly sure I ran screaming around the house in '96 for a good ten or fifteen minutes. But it feels so damned good today. I'm wearing my Yankee yarmulke and proudly showing it off to everybody. Rock on. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|10:47 am] |
Recorded for posterity:
best_ken_ever and I have a bet on the World Series. The terms are:
-Fan of the losing team has to buy Steve a milkshake.
-Fan of the losing team has to put "Go [Other Team]!] in their Board sig for the whole month of April 2010.
Wondering why we're not buying YOU a milkshake? My father always told me "There's two kinds of people at the boarding house table- the quick, and the hungry." Steve was quick.
I'm going to enjoy the Yankees victory. :-D |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Oct. 23rd, 2009|10:34 am] |
Went to see Der Rosenkavalier at the Met last night with a college classmate. Pretty wonderful, pretty damned long.
I'll accept any excuse to get Renee Fleming and Susan Graham on the same stage. Such wonderful musical chemistry. Such artistry, such passion, such professionalism. I could listen to them sing for days on end and never tire.
I love the way Der Rosenkavalier skewers the Marriage of Figaro, how it blends Cherubino and Figaro into the marvelous figure of Octavian and yet! and yet it doesn't sacrifice Rosin... sorry, the Marschallin's immense power and presence and even enriches her with greater philosophical sophistication. This is an opera about women, even when it's about men.
I didn't love the Met's presentation of the Marschallin's black servant boy Mahomet, silently dancing around the stage in a comically oversized turban at the beck and call of the Marschallin. I think they were tryyyyyying for "Look, cute little boy, laugh!", but given the power dynamics it was stomach-churning. I hated every time the audience laughed at his capering.
I think it's really interesting how we don't see Susa...Sophie at all in the first act and don't see the Marschallin at all in the second act. It obviously sets up the in-fucking-credible I can't believe Strauss just did that finale trio, but it also keeps the play from being overwhelmed with characters. For a long, involved comic opera it's quite easy to keep track of what's going on.
You spend enough time listening to opera and you start developing ideas of what will work. Ideas like, "There's no way you can just have three sopranos up there for twenty minutes singing their hearts out." And then you see Strauss and you are forced to reevaluate what's possible.
The presence of prefigurations of modernity can be startling. You can hear in this music something of Berg at times, but also somewhat shockingly of Weill. And you can feel, viscerally in the music if perhaps not really in the Met's fairly conservative staging, the sense that this world is about to collapse, that the fairy tale world of classic opera is not going to be able to wall itself up from the world for much longer, that even stories that parody life at court are running up against democratic currents that will destroy their meaning. I believe that's what Hoffmannsthal intended to suggest with Mahomet, as well as with Valzacchi and with the monkey who made a disappointing appearance in Act I- the sense that this parochial world is under siege by foreign influences it can't control and who will change everything. I don't think the Met communicates this theme in the opera well at all, except in Renee Fleming's marvelous aria "Die Zeit", which works brilliantly both on a character level and on a social commentary level. I think it's a testament to the talent of Strauss and Hoffmannsthal that you can feel it despite the Met's choice to ignore this part of the story. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Oct. 17th, 2009|07:58 pm] |
So apparently there's a new movie coming out called "Ninja Assassin". My brother was home for Shabbos and we spent all of Shabbos annoying the rest of my family by riffing on this title, trying to come up with subtitles for the inevitable sequel.
"Ninja Assassin II: Ninja Assassins"
"Ninja Assassin II: Legend of the Katana"
"Ninja Assassin II: The Reckoning"
"Ninja Assassin II: Sign of the Snake"
"Ninja Assassin II: Don't Look Behind You"
"Ninja Assassin II: Dueling Pianos"
"Ninja Assassin II: Christmas Vacation"
any thoughts? |
|
|
| The Barber of Seville |
[Oct. 13th, 2009|11:20 am] |
- So first things first: My train into the City stopped for fifteen minutes outside the tunnel into New York. I therefore arrived at the Met 2 minutes after curtain, and was sent to the penalty box. I had to watch the first act in a basement viewing gallery with the other 30 or so people who missed the curtain. Fuck NJ Transit. I hope a giant anvil falls on them.
- And the first act is where most of the highlights are. The wonderfully vivid overture. Figaro's famous aria "Largo al Factotum". And the GIANT FUCKING ANVIL. Yes, the GIANT FUCKING ANVIL. It falls on a cart of pumpkins at the end of Act I for no reason I can discern. Possibly it's a Looney Toons reference? Whatever the reason, it was awesome and I am so sad I only got to see it on screen. I want it to fall on NJ Transit.
- Finally, I made it to my seat. I'm quite pleased with my seats. Directly in the middle of the house, in the second row of the uppermost section. A good view of the stage, unobstructed acoustics, relatively few people to peek over. The Barber staging has a passerelle jut out into the audience, and I had to lean over a bit to see when singers were out there, but for most operas this won't be a concern. I think I'm going to enjoy this season.
- The second act was lovely. The set consists mostly of doors, big doors that are pushed around the stage into different configurations for each scene. It's a sort of stripping down of a room to the comedic essence- all one needs for comedy are doors and places to hide behind. Everything else is extra.
- In this context, I think Figaro becomes a figure not all that different from the way I usually read Iago- as a character of meta-plot existing within a conventional plot. Figaro's legendary cleverness, his ability to navigate any situation, means that the conclusion is never in doubt and the entertainment comes from the sheer skill with which he negotiates his challenges. Mozart makes Figaro a more mortal figure and requires an ultimate intervention from the goddess Rosina, but for Rossini, the Barber is the Barber.
- The Met does love its divas, doesn't it? Joyce DiDonato's applause for her performance as Rosina was noticeably louder than Rodion Pogossov's for Figaro. And she was excellent, but this show belongs to Figaro and I didn't agree with the crowd's elevation of the female lead.
- Maybe it's because I always sit in the cheap seats, but I am always surprised at how many young people come to the Met. It's not a matter of me assuming that young people don't listen to classical music- it's personal experience with every other venue for classical music in the City telling me that I'm usually going to be the youngest person in the room. I've seen shows at Merkin Concert Hall and other significant venues where I was the youngest by twenty or thirty years. And the Met is filled with twenty-somethings. It's awesome to not feel like an intruder.
- Also, I kind of want a GIANT FUCKING ANVIL to fall on Ken. But unlike NJ Transit, I'm sure that feeling will pass. |
|
|
| Enter the Wu Tang: The 36 Chambers |
[Oct. 12th, 2009|10:40 pm] |
- The Wu Tang Clan are a collective of 9!! rappers. This is an astonishingly large group of egos to keep under control. It's an astonishingly unwieldy assemblage of personalities. It is amazing that it works. But what's even more amazing is that it works seamlessly. The handoffs from rapper to rapper are smoother than I'm used to. It's clear that they all actually bought into the concept of working as a team. They legitimately do 'form like Voltron'.
-The multiplicity of personalities has its benefits, of course. There is such a diversity of vocal technique that there is constantly something to listen for, constantly a surprise. One thing the album never is is monotonous.
-Old Dirty Bastard's vocal style is... amazing. I've never heard anybody like him, the way he blends rapping and singing and sound effects into this powerful, whimsical, dominant performance. Why didn't anybody tell me there's a rapper like ODB? I would have listened to a lot more rap if I'd known about him.
- Race, Cultural Appropriation and the Wu Tang Clan is a book length sociology master's thesis. I hope somebody's actually written it, but the dynamics of the Wu Tang's borrowing of tropes from Kung Fu movies that themselves borrow randomly from real Asian cultures are complicated and difficult to work through.
One significant read, I think, is alluded to in "Clan in da Front" with
"One who just represent the Wu-Tang clique/ With the game and soul, of an old school flick/ Like the Mack and Dolomite, who both did bids"
I think we see here that the obvious connection between Kung Fu exploitation and Blaxploitation is being seized here. By appropriating another nation's appropriated culture, they're trying to find a little objectivity to make sense of their own exploited culture.
- This is definitely one of the best rap albums I've ever listened to. But that's not really saying much. I don't listen to enough rap. I'm working on it.
-The RZA is unbelievable. The main reason this album has such an incredible unity and highlight after highlight is his production work. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Oct. 11th, 2009|11:09 pm] |
My Pushing Daisies/Book of Kings crossover story has been posted at the In the Beginning Festival. I am ridiculously proud of it. I think it's probably the best piece of fiction I've ever written.
Title: 18 Chalakim of Life
Rating: PG
Book/character: Kings: Elisha/the Shunamite Woman/Elijah
Warnings: The sort of subtle heresy I prefer to the obvious ones; A violent death which is not in the original story
Crossover: Pushing Daisies
Summary/notes: Tells the story of Elisha and the Shunamite Woman, if Elisha had the power of Ned from Pushing Daisies. Mostly derived from 2 Kings 4, but some sections based on 1 Kings 19. I don't believe it requires any foreknowledge of Pushing Daisies to make sense.
Wordcount:~5000
Acknowledgments: Thanks to sanguinity, thefieldsbeyond, best_ken_ever for their help with revision, and to roga for help with brainstorming.
( This is Elisha... ) |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Oct. 9th, 2009|01:38 am] |
|
No review of the Barber of Seville until I get over the urge to drop a GIANT FUCKING ANVIL on New Jersey Transit. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Oct. 7th, 2009|12:09 pm] |
Where do I stand on Salazar v. Buono? Not where I usually do. Something I wrote a while back on a different but related topic:
In particular, I am strongly of the belief that we should never deny anyone the right to mourn in whatever fashion they see fit- if singing Christian hymns helps people remember lost soldiers, I am 100% in support of that. I am fully capable of finding my own way to remember those lost, and the Jews have compiled our own powerful liturgy of mourning over the years. Grief is one of the places I waive all my demands for multicultural awareness.
So I see nothing wrong with allowing a cross to be the prominent symbol on a memorial to World War I veterans, even without a counterbalance recognizing the Jewish or Muslim or atheist soldiers who served. It's a memorial, and I think the law should allow some leeway for grief.
Now, I understand that this case offers some procedural wrinkle that gives me pause- that the Supreme Court may rule in a way that makes it more difficult for people to challenge government displays of religion in other cases. I have a problem with this potential, because when memorials aren't at issue, I think religious imagery has no place in the public sphere. But I hope the Court can find a way to preserve this memorial. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Oct. 5th, 2009|11:06 am] |
The In the Beginning fanworks festival has opened at in_the_beginning.dreamwidth.org. The festival is dedicated to Bible fanworks- writing and artwork in the contemporary fandom tradition, with the Bible as the source fandom.
There are already some wonderful stories up. There's a genderswap story that re-tells the story of Joseph and Potiphar if Joseph were a girl. There's an absolutely gorgeous piece of writing that sets the stories of Deborah and Miriam next to each other. There's a pretty little poem about Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve. There's a story that creates a Biblical origin story for the Highlander mythos. And there's my fresh look at the mysterious story of Melchizedek, priest of El-Elyon.
And there's more coming! It makes me so excited to see people looking at the Bible with fresh eyes. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
