Twitter

No one would ever describe me as an early adopter. I am not a cutting edge kind of guy. I am usually one of the last people I know to participate in anything technology related. It was true of Facebook. It was true of blogging. And, to the point at hand, it was true of Twitter. I never tweet. I spend very little time, probably less than 10 minute per day,  reading tweets from those I follow.Most of the people I follow are active in the arts or liberal politics.

TIME magazine publishes a list every year of the best Twitter feeds by categories. Here is a link to the 2013 list. I’ll usually check some of them out, at least for a time. I listen to a couple of NPR podcasts and they sometimes suggest new Twitter feeds as well. There is one area, however where Titter has become absolutely indispensable; watching awards shows!

Watching the Academy Awards, or the recent Grammys and Golden Globes, with Twitter open on my phone increases my enjoyment of the awards show about 300%. I love the stream of comments. Some are thoughtful; celebrating someone’s success or expressing disappointment. Some are tawdry. Some are catty humor. All combined, it makes watching much more of a shared experience. It is like attending a really large Oscar viewing party where all the guests were invited because they are witty and articulate. (If they weren’t witty and/or articulate I would not follow them on Twitter).

This new level of enjoyment was kicked into the stratosphere on last Sunday’s Oscars when host Ellen DeGeneres incorporated Twitter into the show by tweeting selfies from the audience, live. Other performers and presenters we tweeting from back stage or from the audience.

Some favorites of the evening:

There were rave tweets about the acceptance speeches of Cate Blanchett and Lupita Nyong’o, less so for Matthew McConaughey.

There was an instant barrage that all said some variation of ‘ what did Travolta just say?‘ or ‘Who the F&%k is “Adele Dazeem?”

Bette Midler tweeted: ‘Backstage at the Oscars – god am I nervous.’ Immediately following her her performance she tweeted; ’ How did I do?‘

After The Wizard of Oz tribute, the ever-irreverent satirical magazine The Onion tweeted: ‘Judy Garland’s bones dumped on stage at the Oscars in an attempt to wring one more song from the old gal.’

The only negative to using social media as an adjunct to television is that I live an area where “live” events are shown on tape delay. People back East are flooding Twitter and FB with spoilers of things I won’t see of 1-2 hours. Nothing is perfect. And any frustration I might have about spoilers is completely self-inflicted. In the words of Mae West; I “could have turned it off!”

Walk of Shame at 65 m.p.h.

The spectrum of sexual expression, like the mighty Mississippi, is wide and deep. People find eroticism in a fascinating, and sometimes appalling, variety of places. I’ve heard it said that “the heart wants what the heart wants”. I guess that is equally true of some of the other organs of the body.

I once heard ‘perversion’ defined as “anything you’re not into personally”. My interests may be more parochial than some but, as rule, as long as things are safe, sane and consensual, I am prepared to “leben and leben lassen“…. live and let live.

My oh-so-sophisticated philosophy was challenged, however, at 6:30 this morning driving down the highway. In the next lane was a woman ‘of a certain age’ driving a mini-van. What struck me at once was the fact that she had her hair in curlers. Some may have thought she was just running late but the facts were obvious to me. It was a walk-of-shame situation.  She was on her way home from one of those curler fetish parties I’ve read about. It would be ‘slut-shaming’ to say she looked the type so I will reserve comment other than the say there was no need to swing by the bakery because there was already a tart in the car.

When I was younger it was more common to see women in curlers. It was a simpler time. Ladies of quality would cover their head with a tasteful scarf if they needed to leave the house but seeing someone with curlers in their hair would not stop traffic or cause a stir in any but the most refined neighborhoods. In recent years, however, it is something I rarely see. I think standards of glamour as well as the technology used to affect them have changed. Curlers have become an anachronism.

Apparently scarcity leads to eroticism. In the same way that a scantily-clad form can be more enticing than one that is totally nude, so too, the sight of luxurious tresses with their curls under construction can drive some folks wild in a way that a perfectly styled coiffure can never quite achieve. I confess I find the whole thing  baffling but I have become aware the ‘curler kink’ is all the rage is certain circles. Some fetishes are just strange. I found this personal ad:

And this one:

Straight people are into all that weird stuff. To paraphrase Ouiser Boudreaux; ‘some people are too twisted for color T.V’.

TMI Thursday – OHHH!….IT’S SO HARD!

Thanks to Sean of Just A Jeep Guy for another great set of TMI Questions.

1. Which class was the hardest in high school?

Trigonometry

.

2. Which is harder – house work or yard work?

Yard work is harder but more satisfying. Housework is continuous.

.

3. Which is the hardest household chore?

Ironing

.

4. Which is harder, eating right or exercising?

Eating right. Going to the gym usually has a social up-side. Eating right usually means foregoing social interactions.

.

5. Which is harder, waking up early or staying up late?

Staying up late is much harder. This has reversed as I have gotten older. Also, living in Arizona; the “we don’t need no stinking Daylight Savings Time” state, skews life toward the morning.

.

6. Do you have a hard time deciding what to wear?

Rarely.
a) the selection is not vast
b) everything here is pretty casual.
The biggest decision is usually shorts vs. long pants; either way they are probably khaki.

.

7. Which is harder, your ass or your abs? Which would you rather?

Neither…….both

.

8. It is harder to wade slowly into a body of water or to just jump in?

If the issue is water temperature, it’s much harder to wade in. If the issue is uncertainty about depth, bottom conditions or what may be lurking beneath the surface, wade slowly…. while whistling a happy tune.

.

9. How hard is it for you to make decisions?

Can be a challenge. I spend way too much time weighing all the options and agonizing over the details.

.

10. What’s the hardest decision you ever had to make?

It’s a tie between ending a personal relationship and euthanizing a pet. The former had fewer clear indicators of whether/when it is the right thing to do but I wasn’t making the decision alone.

With the latter it has been clearer about the correctness of the decision and the timing but it is irrevocable.

.

BONUS 

Have you ever taken viagra or similar drug when you didn’t need it? Details please.

No experience with these meds. Never tried it recreationally and so far; knock on wood (get it? get?…”wood”?) the circumstances or my imagination have been sufficient.

Throw Back Thurday – 2002

Off the Coast of Alaska
August 2002

Harper’s Other Dad had a milestone birthday in 2002 so we celebrated by taking an Alaska cruise. We’d taken cruises before and been mildly disappointed by the dearth of nature’s bachelors among the passengers. At the same time, we weren’t sure we would like going on a “gay cruise”. A friend of mine had booked a Caribbean cruise through Pied Piper Travel in New York. They aggregate groups of LGBT people and book them on popular, mainstream, cruise lines. In this case there were 2500+ passengers on the Celebrity ship; about 110 of which were in our group. It was a nice compromise and we enjoyed it.

It was my first visit trip to Alaska. We flew to Anchorage and then took seven days to sail south to Vancouver B.C. There are both advantages and disadvantages to cruising on a mega-ship but the experience was very nice. We met some terrific people. There were social functions arranged just for our group as well as the usual ship’s activities and excursions.

Certainly one of the more memorable afternoons was in port, Juneau I believe, where we attended a “Lumberjack Show”. The lumberjacks seemed a little taken aback, at least at first, when 75-80 unaccompanied gentlemen arrived for the show; about a 25% of the audience, but they were good sports and everyone had a nice time.

Like most large cruise ships, there was a lounge with dancing. Normally I would not dance with a male partner in what was, effectively, a straight bar but every night at midnight the D.J. would play “It’s Raining Men”. The folks from our group would join the fun on the dance floor. Some of the other guests took that as their cue to retire for evening. Of course the average age of the passengers on an Alaska cruise is well north of 40 so the bar wasn’t exactly packing them in after midnight anyway.

Reverse Rant

Periodically I use this venue to rant about one perceived grievance or another. Often these have been about person or persons ‘un-smart’ doing something mean-spirited toward nature’s bachelors. Fairness dictates that on those rare occasions when some folks within the LGBTQIA (wxyz) community lose touch with reality I step up with equal enthusiasm.

Matthew McConaughey

There has been buzz going around since the Oscar broadcast on Sunday that some of our little band are upset with Matthew McConaughey because he failed to mention the HIV/AIDS community in his acceptance speech. He won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Dallas Buyers Club; a film in which he played a man living with AIDS.

I understand the need for visibility, for heightened awareness,  to take every opportunity to educate and enlighten the public, and, of course, for political correctness, but let’s get a grip folks. OK, it would have been nice had he mentioned the health issue in his speech. He didn’t. Maybe he felt his co-star, Jared Leto, had addressed the topic sufficiently in his acceptance speech earlier in the evening. Maybe he thought his limited time was better spent thanking his mom, God, and with a long rambling testament to his own ego. Maybe he didn’t feel particularly grateful to the HIV/AIDS community. I don’t know. I didn’t love his speech and maybe I’ll do better should I ever win an Oscar. But he is under no obligation to use his limited time and that platform for someone else’s agenda. He’s an actor. As members of the ticket-buying public we are owed his best performance. The award would indicate he didn’t short-change us in that regard.

In a similar vein, some members of the transgender community are upset that Jared Leto did not talk about them in his acceptance speech when he won the Oscar for playing a transgender person living with HIV/AIDS in the same film. He spoke eloquently about HIV/AIDS, among other things, but did not single-out the transgender community by name. My response is the same as the previous paragraph. It would have been great had he done so but he had no obligation and people who are irate need to untwist their knickers and get over it.

Jared Leto

Even more outrageous is the complaint by some in the transgender community that Leto should not have been cast in the role at all. The role should have gone to a transgender actor. All due love and respect to all my bothers and sisters in the LGBTQIA community but that is just ‘effing’ stupid. He seems to have done a pretty good job in the role, given the Oscar and all.

More importantly, are we really going down road? Felicity Huffman and Olympia Dukakis have both played transgendered people and, to the best of my knowledge, they are both genetically female. Should Cher not have been cast in Silkwood because she isn’t really a Lesbian? Should William Hurt, Matthew Broderick, and Tom Hanks not have been cast in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Torch Song Trilogy, and Philadelphia, respectively, because they aren’t gay?  For that matter, should Neil Patrick Harris not have been cast in How I Met Your Mother because the character he plays is straight and he isn’t? How is that anything other than employment discrimination? How far should this madness be carried? Should Meryl Streep not have been cast in Sophie’s Choice because she isn’t really a Holocaust survivor? Should they have given Sandra Bullock’s Gravity role to an actual astronaut?

I am old enough to a recall a time when LGBTQIA actors remained closeted so they could be cast in films and straight actors refused gay roles for fear of being type-cast. High-quality, sensitive portrayals of LGBTQIA people did not exist at all. Now we have talented actors of all orientations competing to portray LGBTQIA people with honesty and sensitivity in award-wining films. Mr Leto deserves praise for a great performance.

Let’s choose our battles more wisely.

House of Cards

While on vacation recently I received an email from my BFF, Netflix, letting me know that Season Two of House of Cards was available. They are so thoughtful at Netflix. That is why they are my BFF.

As most will recall, Netflix started out as an online/snail mail-based service providing DVDs for home viewing. Netflix was to Blockbuster as Amazon was to Borders. Later, they adapted to new technology and started offering streaming content for those of us who can’t possibly plan far enough ahead to wait for the Postal Service. Last year Netflix expanded their business model, yet again, and started producing their own content. They produced new episodes of the cult-hit series Arrested Development as well as two original series; the half-hour prison comedy/drama; Orange is the New Black, and the hour-long political drama; House of Cards.

House of Cards is based on a trilogy of 1990′s BBC programs. Actor Ian Richardson starred as the unscrupulous and manipulative Conservative Member of Parliament, Francis Urquhart. The series was adapted by Andrew Davies from a novel written by Michael Dobbs. Dobbs had been Chief of Staff at Conservative Party headquarters in the Thatcher years and the program was set just after Ms. Thatcher left office.

Ian Richardson in the original BBC House of Cards

In the American version, Kevin Spacey plays U.S. Representative Francis “Frank” J. Underwood; D-South Carolina. His wife, Claire, is played by Robin Wright. ‘Unscrupulous and manipulative’ don’t even begin to describe the kind of power-politics practiced by the Underwoods. I’m not sure the Underwoods could be described as evil but they are certainly wicked. They are ambitious, sociopathic and ruthless to a degee that beggars the imagination. Rules are for other people and that is true in their professional as well as personal lives. The idea that politicians might lie, cheat, and be corrupt is not new but the Underwoods are far beyond that. These people are scary.

Ian Richardson compared Francis Urquhart to Richard III. There are similarities to Shakespeare’s play in both the British and American versions. The primary motivation of the central character is lust for power. Also, as in Shakespeare’s R III, the title character has moments of soliloquy where, in the case of the television productions, he looks directly into the camera communicates with the audience. Sometimes there are ‘sotto voce’ comments. Sometimes a sly look and a raised eyebrow are enough.

It is hard to describe House of Cards without using Shakespearean terms. I’ve read descriptions of the Frank Underwood character comparing him to J.R. Ewing from Dallas; “the man you love to hate”, but J.R. was a naughty schoolboy by comparison. Spacey’s Underwood is part Macbeth, part Iago, and part Richard III. Compared to Claire Underwood. Lady Macbeth was a dilettante. When Claire Underwood washes her hands it is not a metaphor for ethical crisis. She doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty at all. She just doesn’t want there to be any visible evidence. The wife’s role is more prominent in the American series and the relationship between Frank and Claire is fascinating to watch. They clearly love each other deeply but have a partnership unlike anything I have ever seen on television.

Kevin Spacey & Robin Wright as the ruthless Frank & Claire Underwood

It is tempting to compare House of Cards to another Harper’s Keeper favorite; The West Wing. Both are high-quality dramas set against the backdrop of contemporary Washington DC. But whereas The West Wing depicted fundamentally admirable people dealing with political issues, House of Cards shows us powerful people; who could not care less whether you admire them, grasping for even greater power. The West Wing was ‘behind-the-scenes Washington. House of Cards is ‘under-the-rock Washington. Idealists would be frustrated by The West Wing-style politics. Idealists would become suicidal thinking about the politics as represented in House of Cards.

Netflix did not create the practice of binge-viewing. That pattern has been developing since we started watching series television on DVDs. The “On Demand’ access available through most cable providers has carried us further down that road. Netflix has institutionalized binge viewing, however, with its movement into series content. Season One of House of Cards became available, all 13 episodes at once, in February, 2013. All 13 episodes of Season Two became available last month.

I mention binge viewing because, while the House of Cards episodes can be watched individually, one gets a better picture of the arc of these characters if you watch from the beginning. Luckily Netflix makes that ever-so-easy to do. It’s worth starting at the beginning.

I always take pains to avoid spoilers and this will be no exception. The series begins at a transitional point in Frank’s career. Season One ends with him reaching a milestone. Season 2 ends with him reaching another milestone. Of course the fun is seeing all the comes between.  The performances are top-notch. The writing is first-rate. There is enough wheeling & dealing to keep those who like that kind of drama happy. There are enough sexy sub-plots to keep the prime-time soap opera crowd happy. Since I like both I am very happy indeed. The only thing about House of Cards that makes me unhappy is I have to wait 11 months for Season 3.

задумчивый и нудно*

March 1st, 2014 was ’Culture Vulture Saturday’ in Harper’s Valley. It happens a couple of times each season; a day with two operas. In the morning we attended the Met’s “Live in HD” simulcast of Borodin’s Prince Igor. In the evening we attended Arizona Opera’s production of La Traviata. Never has the Arizona Opera looked so good in comparison with The Met.

Polovtsian Poppy Field

Prince Igor is an opera with an interesting history. Borodin worked on it, his only opera, for 18 years; from 1869 until his death in 1887. It was incomplete at the time of his death. He’d composed some powerful and beautiful music and a series of scenes but the work was not cohesively formed into an opera. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov took it upon themselves to complete the work and it premiered in 1890. A popular opera in Russia, it is performed less often in the West. The current production is The Met’s first staging of Prince Igor since 1917.

The new Met production is a departure from earlier iterations of Prince Igor. In this case, the director and conductor have reworked the opera significantly. They have re-ordered scenes based on notes left by the composer, eliminated some of the music added after Borodin’s death, and created a completely new ending using music Borodin composed for another work. Their intention was to refocus the story away from its historical epic tone and onto a more fully developed title character. All of that sounds really interesting. So why was I sitting in the theater thinking; ‘this is the worst thing I have ever seen on the Met stage’?

Part of the challenge, for me, is the opera itself. In true Russian fashion, Prince Igor is dark and brooding and moves at a pace that, at times, seems glacial. The revised score adds to my discomfort with the pace because; despite it being the title role, Igor doesn’t sing much. He sings in the Prologue though is silent for much of it. He appears in the new Act I though sings little. He does not appear in Act II at all. He re-enters about half way through the final Act though spends much of it brooding in silence. Igor is a brooder. The director’s effort to refocus the drama on the inner turmoil of Igor without more opportunity for him to sing leaves him wandering around the stage, flailing his arms, and. literally, spinning in circles, silently emoting his inner angst. A little of that goes a long way and this opera, with intermissions, is more than four hours long.

Igor was a 12th century Russian prince and Borodin set his opera in the year 1158 CE. This production updates it closer to the time of its premier; late 19th or early 20th century. Part of the audience’s obligation is to suspend disbelief so I normally try to give a production the benefit of any doubt regarding time & place changes. In this case, however it seemed more than usually troubling. Early in the Prologue a solar eclipse portends bad things to come and everyone is sore afraid of this evil omen. Hysteria over an eclipse makes perfect sense in 1150 CE; in 1900, perhaps not so much. Certainly it would not establish a basis for whatever existential crisis Igor is nursing since he started wandering around the stage looking vexed well before the lights dimmed.

Putivl in Ruins

The Prologue and Acts II and III are set in the town of Putivl. The hall has a Soviet-era feel about it but it certainly could have been pre-revolutionary. The costumes clearly establish the time as prior to World War I.

It sounds minor and I am not sure whether my issue is with the set decoration, the costume design or the lighting but, at least on the HD screen, the Boyars’ (noblemen) uniforms were the same color as the walls. At times, in the Prologue their bodies blended into the wall and their heads appeared to bounce around freely, about five feet above the floor. I can envision operas where that might be a desirable effect but, in this case, it was distracting.

The production used pre-recorded, Sergei Eisenstein-style, silent images, before the Prologue, in the transition from the Prologue to Act I, and during Act I. I could not tell how they were presented in the opera house but on the HD screen they were very dramatic. I liked them.  They were especially effective in conveying the battle and it’s aftermath. This prompts me to wonder, with the visual technique already established as a part of the production’s language, why they chose not to use such images again to show the battle that destroys Putivl at the end of Act II. Perhaps the images were supposed to exist only in Igor’s mind and were not used because he did not witness the battle of Putivl? This invites the question why black & white images, more akin to the muted color palate of Act III than to the dream sequences in Act I were used. It also prompts me to wonder why so many of the images are close-ups of Igor’s face. This is typically not an image one remembers. These facial images did afford the director opportunity to make the first visual connections between Igor and Christ, however. It is an allusion that will be repeated throughout the production.

In the new production, all of Act I is a dream sequence set in a Polovtsian poppy field. In the older structure this scene was part of Act II. I thought the pre-recorded material was slightly less effective here because it seemed out of synch with the live action. Also, some of the events he envisions in the poppy field are clearly dreams because the other performers are not aware of Igor. At other times, he interacts with the characters in the field. I presume the interactions with his wife (still in Putivl) are memories or fantasies but the images of his son who was with him in the battle and the Polovtsians cannot be memories. He interacts with the characters in the field physically at times. The sequence would have been clearer had there been some visual, or at least physical separation between the dreamer and the dreams. The Polovtsian ballet sequence at the end is wonderful but the whole Act is too long and too muddled.

Acts II and III are more traditionally staged, and a bit of a relief. The realistic staging, darker lighting and muted color palate are in marked contrast aesthetically from the Act I dream sequence but very much, ‘of a piece’ with the Prologue. They reinforces the dream-like quality of the previous Act.

Act III shows the grim aftermath of Putivl’s destruction. Igor appears in the middle of the Act. There is a brief memory sequence, effectively delimited by a change in lighting and more Igor-as-Christ imagery. The former structure of the opera concluded with the people joyously celebrating the return of their Prince. In the new production, additional music has been added of a much more somber tone and Igor leads his people, by example, in beginning to rebuild. This offers one final opportunity to position Igor as a Christ-figure, in case anyone in the audience missed the previous allusions due to their sledgehammer-like subtlety.

I almost left the opera at the end of Act I. I disliked it that much. I’m glad I decided to stay. There is a very dramatic scene in Act II where it appears there may be a gang rape which is surprisingly strong. And I loved the final minutes where the new ending has been added. That means I enjoyed about 30 minutes of the 4.5 hours I invested in Prince Igor.

Aside from those positives, I found it muddled and mind-numbingly slow. There was insufficient groundwork laid for why Igor’s soul is so tortured and trying to explore those depths using only the singer’s facial and body movements without exposition or soliloquy was ineffective. Much of the acting felt like over-the-top histrionics. This may have played well in the back rows of the opera house but on the HD screen it looked like ‘Snidley Whiplash learns Russian’. It is quite possible that this production is the best way to present this opera. I can’t envision any circumstance where I might test that theory however.

*brooding and tedious