The esteemed Brit actress Dame Maggie Smith is no more. So brilliantly unforgettable and self-effacingly comedic her hilarious Jocasta from 1986/87 Lyric Theatre Hammersmith in Simon Callow's The Infernal Machine [Cocteau], still lingers in my mind:
JOCASTA. And what is the use of your third eye, I should like to
know? Have you found the Sphinx? Have you found the
Murderers of Laius? Have you calmed the people? Guards are
stationed at my door and I am left with things that hate me, that
want my death!
But everything was beautiful at the ballet. [Spoiler: this link contains some very disturbing racist comments in official 1960's government communiqués] Alas, begging the question: who wasn't? And isn't one reminded of a scene in The Third Man? Even more so with those 'dots' on the ground in modern aerial warfare.
Walter Benjamin once said that a child's first experience of the world is not his realization that "adults are stronger but rather that he cannot make magic."! -Giorgio Agamben
[Hello Victoria and..don’t give up on the wand: banished..]-my website, I'll send coded messages to whom ever I want!
Deleuze, The Fold: The Baroque artists know well that hallucination does not feign presence, but that presence is hallucinatory.
Jamie Lee Curtis reveals a letter she’d just received that her mother wrote to her father: The letter then opened a door, I opened the door, then five other doors opened. Addiction is different for everyone, except when it’s truly addiction then it truly is the same bottom line for everybody. Totally different circumstances, financial means, emotional trauma. But the same bottom line. Getting the right help is the problem. And remains so in America as the solution for each is always different.
Many folk are fine long as they’re doing something they enjoy. Drinking like fish yet pulling it altogether. Day after day, week after, etc etc. If the daily ‘round disappears or the moral compass turns shit can happen. Mathew Perry no doubt thought he had it all sorted giving up alcohol for ketamine. He was no idiot. The exclusive, expensive Swiss clinic were the ones who claimed ketamine was fine. And it can be. He even set up his own re-hab clinic in Los Angeles. What he never seemed to have was someone to guide him through the storms that seemingly came from nowhere. When to raise or lower the keel, lower or raise the anchor. Seek safe harbor.
Sanctimonious the worst common! Wisdom rare. Friendship…
Joker: Folie à Deux has been rollin’ out 'cross the world last few days. Something tells me wait 'till Christmas for some inspirational cheering up and cheering down in a very unusual way.
Speaking of body image: KITTY so purrpleased with her ORLAN signed edition, Voila à trois chats Ménage! -Vamoose KITTY. All the cats are jealous now.
R we back into ‘70s performance art, Joan Jonas et al? Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, Terence Tyrannosuar- [Creature Channel] whoah love is, ummh, something else! KITTY’s quite partial to Terence retro: These boots are made for walkin’, and they’ll….
All joking aside, the footprints of civilization asserting itself horrify. Not even the Nazis did what ISIL/Daesh did to the Mosel Museum. The parallel: that the Nazis stored never destroyed priceless art in the salt mines for future cash not ideology. And ISIL though destroying major Assyrian antiquities still kept smaller portions for sale. So pray tell how is that ideological belief? Even if subscribing to ISIL, or ! doctrine it’s utter hypocrisy.
History forever redolent of irony, Assyrians weren’t that different from ISIS or world domination imperialists even carving up their victims, removing noses and ears. Then there are the “Ten lost tribes” of Israel [722 B.C.E.].
In a way, evil is easier to deal with, at least cognitively, than ignorance. -Yuval Noah Harari
A very long time ago, a friend asked of me: Do you think you can be in love with two people at the same time? I remember answering yes. Was doing some research into L.P. Hartley's famous quote from his novel The Go-Between: The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. I always thought it mean't “Or do they?” Only to discover that was exactly what Hartley decided to cut. Decades later I totally understand why.
L. P. Hartley Papers: I have sometimes been asked what gave me the idea for the Go-Between, and have always found the question difficult to answer. […] I think the most operative stimulus of The Go-Between was my memory of the summer of 1900. I was four and a half and it was the first time I was consciously aware of the weather – at least it was the first time the weather made a mark on my memory. From then on, for many years, I always hoped that that long succession of hot days would be repeated, but unless my memory betrays me it never was, in England at any rate, until 1959. It became for me a kind of Golden Age – almost literally, for I think of it as being the colour of gold. I didn’t want to go back to it but I wanted it to come back to me, and I still do.”
If anyone should be on the Middle East peace negotiations next year it oughta be Yuval Noah Harari. He's absolutely right, the past is the past and will never change. As humans we all at some time or other blame the past for our present, blame ourselves, blame others. Indeed, we can love two people at the same time. Only, there is a passive love and an active love. Any Stanislavski actor will know that it's impossible to play 'being in love'. Active love requires actions/facts/what is seen to reach goals in a relationship; passive love, sense memory of tenses. No less palpable. Two different things living within side by side that needn't eat each other away.
Art is something to occupy your mind while you put up with reality. Reality goes on, you need to be doing something while reality goes on in its way…just the connection is where the thinking happens…and that movement of connection it’s suddenly exhilerating…you are immortal if you forget time. Language can do that for us.- Anne Carson
Scroll to the bottom and there’s KITTY’s plangent song of a Ukraine ‘Jellicle Ball’…кіт….way when….
KITTY’s Saturday Night Documentary
Alma Deutscher [19 y/old]. Wow! She doesn’t just conduct, rather dances with an orchestra.
Speaking of occupying the mind, putting up with reality on and on and on and on and on...Joyce DiDonato Master Class fresh on YouTube [Carnegie Hall, October 10, 2024]. Who could ask for anything more…;)
Dagli questa orchidea.
Digli che trovo la sua purezza
Acconcia; e che i suoi petali contengono
Il piacere della donna e il dolore della donna,
E tutta la vergogna di Lucrezia.
Dagli questa orchidea
E digli che è stata inviata da una sgualdrina romana.
E digli di venire qui immediatamente da lei.
Digli di venire a casa.
Vai! Vai! No!
Aspetta, di' al messaggero di prendere il mio amore.
Sì, dai il mio amore al messaggero,
Dai il mio amore allo scudiero,
Dai il mio amore anche al cocchiere.
E presto, presto, perché tutti gli uomini amano
la casta Lucrezia.-The Rape of Lucretia, Op.37 [Benjamin Britten]
A respected veteran actress once mused to me: you say the lines over and over ‘till the tears stop. Then you are ready for an audience, for it’s they who must cry. Very Greek advice in its way. And very Brechtian. Opera seems so much easier but in reality so so much harder. All that technique allowing the emotions to flow. Rather, the emotions become the technique. Frisson between the composer’s notes and markings and reality of performance. Every note and phrase embodiments of a soul water and fire.
And far away our faces met
As on the verge of the vast spheres;
And in the night our cheeks were wet,
I could not say with dew or tears.- George William Russell
I have a question for Joyce DiDonato: is there a song or aria that you find almost impossible to sing, that utterly wells that emotional core to the point where…?
Music in Spring, Flowers for a King, All these I bring to you.
So wanted to work with Robert Altman and after a cough and spit in Dancer in the Dark thought maybe. Just maybe: Gosford Park. Here’s where one ought to trust not despise casting directors. And in opera! They know what they are doing. They are our cheerleaders, oft agin all odds! More chutzpah on my part? Maybe, maybe not. Worked for Streisand and, and , and..and Must the winter come so soon [Samuel Barber’s Vanessa] now a staple of C20 opera repetoire. Rosalind Elias, the chutzpah even to suggest she needed an aria. And history was made.
