november_drift

I can't believe I dreamed an entire opera whose closing performance by a small local outfit I was all set to attend before it was canceled at the last unavoidable minute. It was a Gian Carlo Menotti from 1948 and had never before received a Boston premiere. I had read its libretto for years because it was full of sand and sea-haunting: No body that presses its mouth to the shore closer than your mouth to mine. No eye that fades into the haze of the sun more fixed than your eye to mine. No ship of a letter that crosses the seas faster than my hand to yours, unless it has foundered, unless it has torn on the black rocks of the heart. It had one of his terse, enigmatic titles, The Visitor. The company that had put it up was called Marmalade and Gold, an allusion whose meaning did not escape the event horizon of waking, and specialized in bare-bones, slightly more than concert performances of oddities or undeserved obscurities of the twentieth-century opera world: I remember perusing the catalogue of previous seasons on their website and approving of their choices, all of which I suspect of not existing outside of the hour or so I was asleep. Erich Wolfgang Korngold did write a bunch of operas, mostly before—very popular choice—leaving Germany, but I do not believe a 1932 Der lahme König was among them. I am having a terrible week for which the external world offers nothing in the way of respite and even if I didn't get to hear any of its music, I appreciate the inside of my head attempting to furnish a break of art.

The wall-to-wall crowd of the memorial from which I have just returned testifies to the love poured out and returned by the guest of honor, but I would still rather have been in the worldline where they were present to be celebrated in more than memory.

It is the dozenth birthday of Hestia Hermia Linsky-Noyes, lhude sing meaw! We sang to her after midnight. She ate eagerly of her festive ham. She has spent the afternoon in the pursuit of Bird Theater. I remember her brother under that same light. Bast smiled when our cats were born.

Not only is 42 °N a lousy latitude for radio astronomy, it does jack most of the year for the photosynthesis of vitamin D, but I was inspired by the summerlike spike in temperatures to walk out for groceries in a T-shirt and whatever it may or may not have done for my metabolism, it was worth the pitching over onto the couch when I got home.



No introduction to an actor may be as misleading as discovering Peter Lorre with Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), but spending much of last night sacked out in front of my longtime comfort movie of Robert Aldrich's The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) reminded me that I should probably count Richard Attenborough in a similar vein, all those weak links and bad influences his panicking debut in In Which We Serve (1942) and his nihilistic breakout in Brighton Rock (1947) set him up for. Never mind that I saw him first as the briskly competent ringleader of The Great Escape (1963), he looks much more in his ambivalent element as Lew Moran, the middle-aged navigator who may have his moral compass screwed on straightest of the sun-blistered survivors of what will become the Phoenix but little authority between his uneasy position as peacemaker and his diffidence as a drying-out drunk, even if his stammer doesn't after all stop him from going off like a firecracker on some blatantly bullheaded display of stupidity on the part of one or more of his co-leads. It would have been the second way I saw him, after which the time-shock of Jurassic Park (1993), jovial and grandfatherly and scientifically short-sighted. I'd give a lot for a record of his Sergeant Trotter in the original run of The Mousetrap. The time machine bureau is going to cut me off.

For various reasons not limited to the overhead activity of children in the mornings, last night was the first real time all week that I slept and have thus spent most of the day in a vague state of hibernation despite the warmth of the air. There was a mauve overcast around sunset that turned out to belong to a volcanic wall of gold and bougainvillea over an agate-blue cloud-band. Have some mostly musical links.

For the more than twenty years since lesser_celery made me a CD of Peter Gabriel's Melt (1980), I have assumed that the eerily voiced French refrain of "Games Without Frontiers" was either the singer's own falsetto or pitch-shifted vocals. It turns out to be Kate Bush. I would never have identified her on my own, but then I thought about "Army Dreamers" (1980).

I grew up on Arlo Guthrie, but my favorite version of "City of New Orleans" (1971) is almost certainly Steve Goodman himself in 1970, where he reminded me unexpectedly of a Chicago-accented Stan Rogers. It's driving me nuts that I would swear the first person I heard lead "The Twentieth Century Is Almost Over" (1977) was Pete Seeger and I can't figure out where.

WERS has been playing nothing but female artists for International Women's Day, which means everything from Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman" (1978), Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine" (1983), and Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl" (1993) to Tegan and Sara's "I'll Be Back Someday" (2019), Orla Gartland's "Little Chaos" (2024), and Arlo Parks' "2SIDED" (2026). I had a moral obligation to let my father know when Rickie Lee Jones came around.

Video quality regardless, sholio's "Waking Up in Vegas" (The Greatest American Hero) remains one of my all-time favorites of their vids.