Truly, a case of the Mondays
Some links and some silliness
Good morning. Welcome to a new week. It’s okay if you’re scared or sad.
My husband and I have been watching a lot of opera lately, because every day at 7:30pm EST the Metropolitan Opera turns one of its pre-recorded operas loose on their website and various apps (we watch via the app on our Apple TV). They’re the same wildly popular broadcasts that they used to and hopefully still will release in movie theaters as “events.” Last night we watched Eugene Onegin. Several nights ago, it was La Fille du Regiment.
These home broadcasts during a lonely time seem to be very popular too. Last Tuesday I tried to stream via the website around 8:00pm, and I was number sixty seven thousand “in line” to watch. (Thankfully the apps have no wait time.)
Eugene Onegin was very good. Not Eugene himself, who is a bad dude, but the opera, composed by Tchaikovsky.
We are more theater and film and dance people than opera people (I think we’ve seen two together — The Magic Flute at the Met and Einstein at the Beach at BAM). But it turns out opera is just about perfect for our tumultuous and confusing and frightening times. Everything is just big and wild and bonkers in opera. Every single one seems simultaneously to be extremely long and to end incredibly abruptly. People die, and fall irrevocably in love in two seconds; there are huge crowds and sometimes animals on stage. Opera is the mirror opposite of subtlety. It’s pretty fun.
This week, in an ominous and apocalyptic move, the Met is airing all Wagner all the time: Tristan and Isolde tonight, and then the Ring Cycle, the big crazy LePage version, for which the sets were so heavy that they had to reinforce the stage. I have things to watch for work tonight so I’m skipping Tristan, but I’m going to make an attempt to watch all four parts of the Ring Cycle, the final of which is nearly five hours long. It’s a very silly thing to do, but these are strange and apocalyptic times, and besides, I’ve never seen it, and school starts back this week on top of everything, so I’m going to need something bombastic to get me through. Probably, I will tweet about it.
Here’s some stuff worth reading:
Paul Elie in the New Yorker, “(Against) Virus as Metaphor” — relevant to something I’m working on this week, but also just a good read. I am very interested in (and concerned about) the public rhetoric around the pandemic. The words we use to talk about things, no matter what certain people may want you to think, have immense power. (I read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor over the weekend, too, and I know this isn’t news, but it’s phenomenal.)
I recommended Olafur Arnalds’s Island Songs album (really, an EP) this weekend to a friend and was reminded of how gorgeous, soothing, and moving the accompanying visual album is. It starts with an Icelandic poet, and then turns to some truly transcendent stagings in Arnalds’s home country. Honestly, it’s just wonderful.
Everyone is putting together lists of things you should stream at home, but I quite like this list from the film team at the MoMA.
Chinese-Americans are fearing for their safety. If that’s you, I’m so sorry. If not, then let’s do what we can to express support and combat fear and racism in a real, true way.
Thanks to some friends, I listened to this totally engrossing and fascinating episode of the ReplyAll podcast, entitled “The Case of the Missing Hit.” Very much recommend on your next solo walk or while you’re wrangling dinner.
More soon, friends.