ANDREW: Have no idea why some of these 'idiots' send you proposals for 'Moo' product. This very well-known furniture brand asked if you'd consider sitting on their sofa and: "there is always the 'moo' in the 'meow' ". Then kittens and puppies merge from nowhere. Now what the 'f' does that mean?!
KITTY: [thinks]
ANDREW: Our 'Moo' never had time to relax in his entire life! And when he did…well look what happened!
KITTY: [still thinking, nodding in agreement]
ANDREW: [thinking] Know what be be real and funny (and maybe sell their 'shit') is if an itinerant frustrated couple (Moo and Meow) threw the sofa out their window, jumped on, landed totally intact 6 floors below on the pavement. Then:! both raise their respective paw/hooves. Thus spake: "Never give up the fight".
Now THAT would sell their 'ffing' sofa!
KITTY: Never know whether you are so so old school or so so new school, Captain.
[she gives an 'internal' look saying sweetly to herself] Is he too radical for me Momma?
Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch,
Lust, Niemandes Schlaf zu sein
unter soviel Lidern
Some films and documentaries for the weekend that may not all quite lift one's spirits but certainly will enlighten:
Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (worth seeking the DVD for the extras)
Here's a 'prescience' obsession, again: somewhat forgotten (well rarely seen, you can lead a fish to a lightbulb,,,but’) 2013 live-action/animated film directed by Ari Folman and based on a Stanisław Lem novel (as was a Tarkovsky film),
The Congress (no relation, yet strangely maybe…!)
Myths and Hymns (originally known as Saturn Returns) is a song cycle by composer Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza-(Broadway) some knew!) [re: Piazza-Register for a Jan 28, 7pm discussion]. Leonard Bernstein would have totally embraced this! (not exactly praised in his lifetime [or indeed thereafter] for some of his …). Hey, he didn't fare so badly, after all. If someone had suggested only a year ago that THIS multi-screen presentation of a theater work would pave a way perhaps, not an alternative future for theater and opera and everything else…
This isn't (nor ever was) a message. Simply (and so not exactly new!) a medium. To say: we are here. We are in the same world as you! It's kinda been co-opted through decades of corporate. Alas, indeed, equally somewhat by spineless liberals. And of course, …but don't finish that sentence. "Leave you, leave you, how could I leave you……"
There's more to come….! We've begun: Elizabeth Stanley (not singling anybody out like how could one not!:) Even upstaging Renée Fleming! Not that so meant. Or knew. Hello casting directors. What 'a little moonlight can do'?! Imagination. "So little to be sure of…"
[slight correction 'cause that is unfair. All the film casting directors I've ever dealt with have been incredibly astute. Maybe blame the producers instead:)]
Dreamgirls a common' on. An;' Kitty ain't nothing like those fur-lines….! Who says wishes can’t come true…!
How does it feel
'Wet'.
Cold.
'Lonely'.
Everyone 'round feels comforted.
Kitten alone
First time.
Braving all odds.
She knows not.
Win or lose.
...
Alas, there is a burning, bitter paradox to the medium when those whose views seem hellbent on gnawing away at others gain prominence.. The great poet Rilke wrote Mussolini a letter of support in the 1920's. So too did President Franklin D. Roosevelt. History proves not only a cruel mistress moreover a total bitch.
When you're just out walking and you pass
Little signs that say "keep off the grass"
Did you ever stop and ask yourself why?
Pretty playgrounds children used to know
Little squares where lovers love to go
Disappear so parking lots can grow
Why?
Once you start the questions never cease
What's disturbed when you disturb the peace
Pets and children are prohibited
Why? ask yourself why?
And when you think about it
Bullets fly like popcorn on the screen
Recommended wholesome nice and clean
Making love's the thing that can't be seen
Why?
You know: fact- President John F Kennedy wasn't immune to chasing a young female down a corridor. Cornering her. Somehow, ultimately though, don't think he'd have signed off on that. Given. Was he any less a force for democracy?
Now, I will be hated, unfairly so. But the only thing that really did make me LOL OUT LOUD with no stimulants or depressants in the last few grueling months was this. A name that readily crossed our lips and is now no longer lest we turn to stone.
Simply the messenger. Though feel drowning in the river Styx. Don't drown the bees!
How should that be so?
There's a somewhat unanswered thread to this post: is there such a thing as 'degenerate comedy' akin to Nazi 'degenerate art'? Can one sculpt comedy out of a Black Panther freedom fighter/terrorist? Clearly yes as one of America's greatest comedy writers has proven. Could you create comedy out of, say, a pedophile? As disgusting as that sounds, maybe. "The scumbag may have been a disgusting degenerate but holy cow did he shit the greatest pizzas in Brooklyn." Me, riffing i.e..
If folks out there have PHD's in what makes comedy funny then I'd be more than happy to receive and read them. What makes The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel so marvelous. One doesn't always realize how funny and absurd is the life we lead. Well, I do, that's what makes me so chronically depressed. One is transported and uplifted to almost another realm, though, when someone is as depressed and disillusioned as you speaks the truth! We are not alone. We are in fact: normal!
You read The New York Post's film critic demanding that Gone With the Wind should be banned 'cause of the Confederacy. Yet The Producers' (Springtime for Hitler) is a sell-out, kill for a ticket show on Broadway! Go figure! Pray tell, what was funny about Adolf Hitler?!
Should we laugh at the TV series Barry, an assassin for hire? Perhaps not, but we do. Pearls would have no existence without the abnormal. One needs no elaboration on that thread. You know: I don't think Nietzsche really ever wanted to sit atop an 'ffffing' mountain aloof in loneliness scribbling away to become an Übermensch. He probably just wanted a hug, a barbecue, a pet. A meaningful 'fuck'. A normal life. It just ain't never happened. Just he knew that the reality of a normal life lay somewhere other. Way bigger.
It's that grit, or lack thereof, in the 'divine oyster' that indelibly changes all our lives. Better or worse. The worse, of course, funnier.
All I am is just a kitten,
All I am is just a cat.
What I do is kind of boring
Eating, purring, spreading on a mat...
I don't mean to complain at all
But they make you feel like you're two feet tall
When you're just a cat
Chorus: Just a housecat.
Just a housecat.
Just a housecat.
Just a housecat.
[the voices get louder and louder and louder in Kitty's head until finally she wakes disheveled from her 'cat-mare'. Upside down, her shoe-box cat-bed upturned, potpourri all over the floor.]
[End Scene. Interval.]
As a very strong night cap to all of this, or perhaps a stiff early cocktail if watching during the daytime, is the Met Opera's Rusalka. Renée Fleming came to prominence (having never looked back) singing Dvořák's hit (though it wasn't then) Song to the Moon at the 1988 National Council Auditions Winners Concert, her first appearance on the Met stage. It takes a while to warm to this opera. Some would say that Otto Schenk's 1993 production doesn't help. Admittedly, I've always had a problem too. In many ways it is such a contemporary piece in spite of its folklore background. Günther Schneider-Siemssen's wood-nymph sets have grown on me over the decades as old-fashioned as they seem. Memory recalls director David Poutney rebooted the whole idea to great acclaim for English National opera way back when.
The threads shimmering creating water ripples (only visible in the close-up broadcast) are incredibly effective as is the mossy set on the enormous Met stage. Ms. Fleming's voice truly mellifluous, deep, soothing, watery. When in the final act Rusalka (the nymph) having at great pains become human sings to her land-locked fickle love that she can't give him passion, there is a contemporaneous chord striking deep. Deep in the waters of all relationships at some point.
Perhaps sentimental and silly to love walking in the footsteps of Dvořák in New York. Something to be said, though, of believing in the spirits. Dvořák died back in Europe in 1904 of influenza aged only 62.
