classical music for dummies

“Classical music isn't a secret society unless we allow it to be.”

—Brigid Delaney, The Guardian, Oct. 16, 2015

CLASSICAL MUSIC FOR DUMMIES

Attending a classical concert or an opera can be an intimidating prospect for newer patrons, but not to worry--on any given night there is a wealth of knowledge and guidance to be gleaned from the more experienced audience members surrounding you. The following are tips and tricks gathered at symphony halls and opera houses across the country.

Don't let something as simple as a cold deter you from attending a performance. You paid for your ticket and are entitled to attend in any state of medical indisposition. Coughing is encouraged, and you will soon note that many others in the audience will join you in solidarity. Nobody minds! However, if you do prefer to use cough drops for the sake of your own comfort, please follow proper etiquette and bring lozenges wrapped individually in crisp plastic. Store them at the bottom of a purse or satchel with a large Velcro closure. Reseal the Velcro firmly every time you retrieve a lozenge, so that when you need another one later on it will be sure still to be there.

Going to the opera or symphony may sound fancy, but really it is no different from watching DVDs on your couch in the living room. Bring a bag of crunchy snacks and a bottle of sparkling water or soda, if you'd like! Just be sure to open these items as slowly as possible, as you will find this helps to mute any noises produced. If someone rudely asks you to be quiet, tradition dictates that you may intentionally chew more dramatically and rustle your snack bag more vigorously. If you bring a metal canteen with water, don't neglect to add ice cubes.

There is plenty of legroom in the rows of seats in most concert and opera houses, so do not be afraid to bring along a large tote bag or backpack. It can sit at your feet and won't bother anyone. It's also a convenient way to transport your snacks!

It is unnecessary for you to have to miss any incoming phone calls or text messages. Under no circumstances should you feel obligated to turn off your phone or mute its ringtone. Your personal communications are more important than any musical performance, and the artists recognize and appreciate that. You are also encouraged to take photos (a flash is advisable), and naturally you may check your email during longer works of ten minutes or more.  

If you are enjoying the music, some "air conducting" and humming along would not be amiss. You may also bob your head or use your entire leg to keep time. It is important that nearby patrons understand how much you appreciate the music, and this is a great way of showing them.

It is likewise important to impress on your neighbors your command of grammatical gender and number in Italian. Shout “bravo,” “brava,” “bravi,” or “brave,” depending on need. Shout these words confidently and smugly, with exaggerated articulation, so that your linguistic prowess may be fully recognized. There is no need to wait for the end of a piece; a slight pause in the music suffices. Musicians have famously large egos, and they especially enjoy shouts of “bravo” and its variants while they are still in the middle of their work.

At the opera, overtures and other purely instrumental sections are considered unimportant; feel free to use these intervals as a chance to chat with your neighbor.

Don't bother to read the synopsis if you are attending an opera with someone who knows the story, since your friend can easily keep you apprised throughout. Request that he or she communicate using a stage whisper, so that the sound will travel quietly yet effectively. This type of opera aficionado can also be a terrific source of valuable ongoing color commentary, such as "That was a long scene," "It's about love and betrayal," or "This singer is from Poland.” 

If you don't have a knowledgable friend to take with you to the opera, you may want to consider using the flashlight feature on your cell phone to assist in reading the synopsis during the performance. The same naturally goes for program notes at the symphony. There is no need to waste your time reading anything before the performance or at intermission.

Your opinion matters! For example, you can and should shout “AWFUL!” at the conclusion of any piece written after 1935. At the opera, onstage abominations such as modern dress or projected images should be met immediately with muttered derision. It is well known that understanding an opera is difficult enough without having to watch it being performed by people who are not wearing hoop skirts.

Napping is expected and encouraged.

Comments on sets/costumes/direction of SFO’s Lucia

(Disclaimer: not a coherent essay, more like a list of observations.)

We are in a nonspecific “near future dystopia” (per director’s own program notes). The world is cold and forbidding—marble, hard surfaces, sharp angles, roiling ocean views. It is beautiful to look at, but intimidating, oppressive, and impersonal. The front curtain projection with the opening in the marble wall narrowing in on itself hints at the suffocating forces that will close in on Lucia. (Update: I noticed that the 'porthole' in the marble gets smaller and smaller each time we see it throughout the opera.)

If you were not specifically told this was the near future, it would be easy to believe it was the present. I like the implicit message in that—the dystopia is already here. The fact that I noticed an actual real estate ad in the program with an $11+ million Pac Heights estate for sale that looked remarkably like Enrico’s living room was a nice bonus.

Family ties are important only insofar as they generate wealth or other advantages. Is it a family or a corporation or a political unit or some combination? Enrico is obsessed with power and influence, but also suffers hugely from anxiety. His obsessive tendencies are evidenced in his manner: stiff, doesn’t like to be touched, needs objects to be arranged just so (e.g., Lucia slightly disturbs the objects on his desk and he is immediately concerned with realigning them), always wearing gloves (germ phobic?). This motivating factor behind his actions (being a control freak with crippling anxiety, that is) makes him a more sympathetic character than the typical Enrico, who can be a cookie cutter jerk. And we are being shown perhaps that obsession and mental instability run in the family.

The clothing and mannerisms of the guards in the opening scene suggest a special forces unit—disciplined, impersonal guns for hire; men in black. Normanno and Alisa have severe, almost angular costumes (even Alisa’s bangs are hard-edged). Enrico is elegant and fastidious in his light suit and gloves. Lucia, on the other hand, in her soft, full, princess-like dress and oversized cloak/hood, looks like someone out of another era or even a fairytale; she does not belong in this world.

Enrico’s estate seems to be perched on a rocky cliff. Again, the setting is beautiful but also harsh and bleak. Nothing here is cozy or welcoming. Lucia is the only person or thing here with soft edges.

Lucia’s wedding dress is quite severe, however, with a high neck and tight bodice, very different from the more billowing style she wears when behaving as her true self. Her flowing hair is likewise pulled into a flat, tight style. It is like watching someone in an extremely elegant straitjacket.

The guests’ dresses at the wedding reception seemed to perplex many viewers, since they seemed more old fashioned, with their full skirts, than other clothing in the production. I took them as a nod to recurring/cyclical ‘retro’ fashion trends, the same ideas recycled over and over with a few new touches. The dresses technically are all unique, yet the overall effect (same basic style, same color palette) is of a uniform, and the one whimsical, potentially personalizing touch—an oversized floral hat—is worn by every woman in the room. This is a society of barely veiled conformity.

I love Arturo’s plaid suit, fur-trimmed jacket/cape, and pompadour hairstyle. The plaid is a funny nod to the Scottish setting, and the over-the-top styling of both the clothes and the hair (another recycled retro look, but seen only on him) suggests he is far less fettered by society than those around him. Indeed, he is described as nouveau riche; the rules of how to be rich haven’t been passed down to him over generations. Arturo just wants to have some fun, for chrissake.

I even love Raimondo’s clothing, in that it reminds me of something they might wear on a Star Trek style planet-that-is-similar-to-Earth-but-not-exactly. It’s us, but not quite. What can we learn from this world? This production is asking similar questions.

The chessboard-like floor is probably the most bang-you-on-the-head-symbolic part of the set, but I confess it took me a while into the dress rehearsal before I had the ‘aha’ moment about it, so I wouldn’t call it too heavy-handed. Lots of floors are, in fact, checkered. And of course it makes a point about the situation being primarily a strategic or political game--with Lucia as pawn--and that makes the story’s consequences for Lucia all the more infuriating.

At the dress rehearsal, the ghost version of Lucia that appears at the end had small, delicate antlers on a natural crown; the antlers were gone on opening night. (I had joked on Twitter that Piotr Beczala must have a clause in his contract requiring antlers in every production, since they had featured prominently in Iolanta at the Met as well.) This was the only last minute change I noticed that I thought was unfortunate. The antlers had reinforced the idea of Lucia’s being a gentle, innocent creature pursued by human hunters. The antlers also kept up the feeling that she was somehow of another world.

Some comments I have seen suggest there is an erotic desire in Enrico towards Arturo, but I think that reading is off, or at least is too literal. In the scene where Lucia is finally agreeing to marry Arturo, she is seated with Enrico at her feet, and he behaves like a lover, stroking her skirt and looking up at her longingly. Avarice is expressed as erotic desire. Any similar-seeming urges towards Arturo have the same basis: the passion for wealth has overwhelmed Enrico's capacity to have interpersonal relationships grounded in anything else. The only time Enrico expresses anything like tender emotion is when he is anticipating increased wealth and power. (Update: I noticed later that when Arturo arrives chez Ashton for the wedding, Enrico gets a barely contained look of eagerness on his face, and stands with outstretched arms and wiggling fingers, as if to say, "Ooh, come to daddy!" or maybe just "Gimme gimme.")

I suppose it is a cliche to talk about updating an opera to make it "relevant," but ultimately I think that is what this production does successfully and quite stylishly. The work is presented as written, but these aren't characters distanced from us by time and outdated social customs; these characters might be us.

Update 10/11: Just back from a third viewing, where I noticed another nice touch. When Raimondo comes from the bridal chamber to tell the guests what has happened, he has blood on his hands, and he rubs them together anxiously. This is especially effective as he sings the line (approx.) "I hope this girl's blood-stained hands don't bring the wrath of God down upon us all." He and we all know that he is deeply culpable in this situation (as are all the other primary male characters, down even to Normanno).

I heard someone wonder what was in this for Arturo, since he has the money Enrico craves so badly, and Enrico is on the verge of collapse. But Arturo is an arriviste, and by marrying into an established family (or acquiring insider status at an established, respected corporation, if you want to look at it that way) he is getting something--gravitas--that you can't just buy in the Neiman Marcus catalog. He has plenty to gain from marrying Lucia.

I keep thinking more about Alisa. Her clothing and mannerisms tell us that she is part of this corporate world, but we also see that she has very little power in it. When she tries to persuade Lucia to give up her affair with Edgardo, it is because her insight into the reality of their world tells her that Lucia's romantic sensibility will be her ruin. Throughout the opera we see Alisa trying to argue with the men around her, as if pleading angrily and desperately for her friend; she is repeatedly rebuffed. 

Yesterday I heard someone defending Edgardo, saying that he pledged to be faithful and did in fact write letters to Lucia, as promised. But it is a total jerk move to coerce a young woman into being your wife (even if she's just your unauthorized moor-wedding wife) right before you head off to another country for an extended period. This is just a more romantic-seeming way of asking her to wear a chastity belt. I mean, please.

Update 10/21: I noticed a new thing today, from the balcony viewpoint--when Lucia signs the wedding contract, everyone on stage (which includes all the wedding guests) crowds behind her, leaning forward expectantly. It's a nice, almost literal image of social pressure.

a day in san francisco

Yesterday James and I went for a walk and I took along my new camera. The photo below was taken two blocks from my house. I cannot even tell you how much I love living in San Francisco.


Here's James in front of a shop on Haight where it seems they will know how to communicate with him:


Holding hands with his new friend:


Detail from a mural:


This very, very large bird was just a little dark spot from where we were standing, but the sooper dooper digital telephoto lens even lets us see his mottled feathers and his pointy pointy beak and toes. Just one of many awesome features.


Fall produce is pretty:






What's the point of walking past 18th and Dolores if you're not going to stop for some Bi-Rite ice cream? I didn't like the way the sunshine was washing out the C on the sign, so I just captured the REAM part. REAM!


More nice signage in the Mission:



In addition to seeing all these nice sights, we had breakfast at Herbivore, lunch at Papalote, and dinner at Tsunami. Have I mentioned I love living in San Francisco? Also, it's a good thing that we walked 8 miles.

and the winner is...

Last week I put a hand knit blanket up for adoption. Twenty-five people ended up asking to be in the drawing, so apparently I misunderestimated the appeal of the offer. I decided it would be appropriate to draw the winning name from a hand knit hat:


And the winner is...


Paul Skoglund! Paul is someone I've known since dinosaurs walked the earth, which was when I was in high school. Just ask Sarah Palin if you think I'm making this up.

Knitted goods lotteries may become a regular feature here, because lord knows I make more than I can use. I end up employing the stuff as home decor, for chrissake:


(Wow, that monitor looks so wee and quaint now that it's been replaced by an iMac bigger than Godzilla's head). Anyway, so stay tuned if you're into scarves or whatever. In other crafty news, I made a cute dress yesterday.





This one's not up for adoption; I've got four or five little cuties in my social circle who are wearing this size nowadays, so they have dibs.

home dec la la la

Whoohoo, I painted one of my living room walls dark red and I love it. So much better than a big room that's all the same color as a cubicle. And I brought my poppy rug back out to the main living area and got rid of the cream-colored-dust-bunny-from-hell generator also known as my wool shag rug. The shag was more suited to the furninture, but for now this will have to do. Maybe someday when I am making 100% of my salary again I will be able to buy a non-shedding shag rug.

Here's the old version of that wall:


Snooze.

land of the (gluten) free

It turns out that if you are willing to stock up on a few unusual ingredients (tapioca flour, xanthan gum, brown rice flour, etc.), it's not hard to make delicious wheat-free baked goods. Here, for example, is some damned tasty lemon blueberry pound cake:



I highly recommend this gluten free baking book to anyone who needs to avoid wheat or who cooks for someone who does.

free to good home

This blanket is up for adoption. I had fun making it, but I don't need it. And it's kind of wacky, so I don't want to just present it to someone without knowing if they would really like it.

So if you are interested in owning approximately 200,000 hand-knit stitches of sock yarn in patchwork blanket form, send me an email or a Facebook message by September 25th (a week from today). If more than one person is interested, I'll draw a name. If you don't live near me, I will mail it to you. (If you neither know my email address nor are my Facebook friend, then I probably don't know you well enough to give you a blanket that took something like 130 hours to make. I'm just sayin'.)

The photos show the blanket on a queen bed; it's a good size to use as a couch throw (I think it's something like 45" x 53"). Click on the photos to see it more up close and personal. Also, one caveat--although most of these yarns are machine washable, there are a couple mixed in that aren't. That means you'll have to hand wash or dry clean it if you dump your chocolate ice cream on it. But you can be more careful than that, right?

mmmmm cake

Last night Amanda, Alex, Matt, and Other Karen B. came over for dinner. I made another chocolate nut cake and this one actually came out MORE delicious than the previous one. Plus I used a different stencil. I'm sure that made a difference.

can't talk; eating

Gluten-free lemon blueberry muffins. Dudes, these are so yummy. I would not lie to you.



Here's some gluten free quinoa spinach stuff. It is also super duper yummy. It's based on this recipe from the Karina's Kitchen blog. I added feta cheese.



Everything's better with good wine.



Tomorrow there will be guacamole and black bean/sweet potato enchiladas.

mostly pics because I'm mostly lame

I still don't have much besides photos for show & tell. So here goes...

The other day was Tami's birthday, so I made her a gluten-free chocolate nut cake and even busted out the fancy spoons (from the 1920's at the latest; I think my grandmother got them for her wedding):



Amanda brought me the bestest ever little salt and pepper shakers. They perfectly match my dishes:



When I was researching wheat-free cooking I realized that wheat might actually be behind a lot of life-long problems I've had, so I'm experimenting with gluten-free food for at least a month. Baking has been fun:

German plum cake and blueberry-fig-walnut muffins

Gluten-free bread (delicious)

Banana-walnut muffins

I finally got my butt in gear and made some robot-themed baby items for Casey's brand new nephew Matteo. I have been promising Casey for months that I'd do this!

Here's my friend Steph's sweet little girl Gwen wearing a stripey dress I made for her:





And finally, here's a sweater I recently made for myself--just in time for San Francisco's one month of warm weather.

gettin' german wit' it

I am going to another wine tasting dinner tomorrow, and this time I signed up to make the dessert. I said I'd bring German apple cake, and then this afternoon I got all nostalgic for German plum cake, so I made one of those too. It will be interesting to lug these to the East Bay on BART tomorrow night at rush hour, along with an overnight bag and a bottle of wine.



Did I mention that a couple of months ago we were tasting Portuguese reds, and I ended up volunteering to cook a dish called açorda de camarão for 10 people? In someone else's kitchen, and not having cooked said dish in well over a decade? Luckily it didn't suck.

There is no real point to this post other than maybe to make y'all jealous and/or hungry.

reruns--volume II (original title: taking care of business)

(Here's another golden oldie from the India archives, circa July 2007.)

Setting up business in a foreign country/culture means you have to recalibrate what you think of as normal. The last couple of weeks I have been learning a lot about the recruiting and hiring process here, and it's been...interesting.

For example, it is considered perfectly normal and acceptable to arrive to meetings, including job interviews, 15 or 20 or even more minutes late, without apology and typically without a call to alert you of the delay. This seems to be a combination of cultural attitudes and the realities of living in a megacity with unpredictable traffic, transportation, and weather.

Now, back in San Francisco, if a job applicant shows up 20 minutes late for an interview, that person had better have a spectacular excuse involving, oh I dunno, a herd of rabid boar loose in the BART tunnel and an exploding clown on Market street, including photographic and preferably video evidence to back it up. AND a note from a doctor. And the person had better have called me to tell me he or she would be late. Only then would a 20-minute delay not warrant summary dismissal as a potential hire, because, dude, it's a job interview. If you can't make it in time to that, why should I believe you can do anything at all on time? But here in India...not so much.

Another thing that fascinates me is the kind of information that is included on resumes. You almost always are told the person's date of birth and marital status, and often you are helpfully provided with the applicant's passport and/or driver's license number. My favorite, though, is that people usually list a few of their hobbies. Cricket is often mentioned (the sport, I mean; I have not seen any resumes from entomology enthusiasts so far), and, oddly, table tennis (not that I would ever turn down a good game of table tennis, but I'm just sayin'--who the hell is that into ping pong that they can't even refrain from mentioning it on their resume?). The very, very best is when people put things like "Vivek enjoys the movies and listening to soft music," or "Ritu likes to read and watch TV."* You are trying to impress someone into hiring you for a director-level position AND THE BEST HOBBY YOU CAN COME UP WITH IS WATCHING TV??" I give up.

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent, and also I can't remember any of their actual names at the moment.

say it ain't so, joe!

CNN mini-headline of the day:

JOE JACKSON DENIES ABUSING MICHAEL

werner, ich liebe dich

My love affair with Werner Herzog continues. I recently watched My Best Fiend (about his work with Klaus Kinski), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (documentary about Dieter Dengler), and Woyzeck (film of the drama fragment by Büchner, starring Kinski).

Before we begin, let's just get one thing out of the way: Klaus Kinski was brilliant, and also absolutely, monumentally batshit fucking crazy. Exempli gratia: he did "Jesus tours" where he basically went around and did a stage show where he raved semi-coherently at his audience while informing them, and not very politely either, that they ought to be kneeling before him and kissing his dusty feet. "I'm not the official church Jesus," he admits in one clip from My Best Fiend. Which kind of makes me love him, to be honest.

Anyway, back to Werner Herzog. His resemblance to my father prevents my schoolgirl crush from going anywhere beyond the platonic--which is probably a very good thing for Herr Herzog, who'd otherwise be contending with me on his doorstep on a regular basis, or at the very least suffering an aggressive multimedia campaign attempting to persuade him that his true love resides in Northern California and enjoys knitting, the collected works of Bob Dylan, and theoretical linguistics.

I think what I love most about Herzog is his resounding capacity for understatement. For instance, when describing the filming of Fitzcarraldo (in the Amazonian jungle), he mentions that he was staying in the hut of a local woman, a hunchback dwarf with nine children, who kept about 150 guinea pigs. "These were for food," he notes, "But at night they would crawl all over me, and this was uncomfortable." So, you know, he went to stay in some other hut.

Here's a photo of my dad, so you'll see I'm not joking about the similarity. Plus they're both nutty Germans with adorable accents, which doesn't exactly downplay the resemblance.



(I am 18 years old in this photo, in case anyone is wondering.)

keeping austin weird

I am in Texas for the Fourth of July weekend, mainly because I love 100+ degree temperatures, large bugs, and copious and unabashed pro-U.S.A. "these colors don't run" style sentiment. Also, I am a devout Christian and favor big hair.

The real reason I am in Austin is that this is the home of my fun and kooky pseudo-in-laws, as well as the lovely and delightful Vickie Howell, who is one of my MEOW kitties and who has a wee 5-week-old bebeh at the moment.

James's sister and her husband live in a development called Agave, which is all cubist/modernist and eco-friendly, and it is so effing cool that I almost want to move to Austin so I can live in one of these homes. There's also the fact that even the largest, fancy-schmanciest model still does not set you back as much as an 875-ish sq ft Edwardian apartment in San Francisco (ask me how I know). Plus this neighborhood attracts the upscale lefty hipster tree-hugger types, what with being all sustainable and shit, so it would practically be like living in San Francisco anyway. Except for the heat and the giant bugs and all.











Here is my sorta-brother-in-law-in-law in his kung fu outfit. Also, a photo of his horrifying gorilla-foot kung fu shoes.





There are cute cats here. This one tries to act all dignified:



Except when she doesn't:



But she is still awfully cute: