An Afternoon at the Opera

“What I want to know is why all these damn women get their fucking way at the end of the opera? I mean, I’m starting to notice it now: They always get the guy they want. And in this case, it wasn’t even really a guy!”

It had been an afternoon where reality—never in abundance at the opera—had been completely shredded, and though the music was great, the plot? Well, even Joyce DiDonato admitted it: It was more than a little off.

What there was of it, which wasn’t much. Here’s what we had to work with, or endure, as Montalvo might have said, since we had taken him to go hear Joyce DiDonato sail her way through Rossini’s deservedly obscure opera La Donna del Lago: Elena (DiDonato) is the daughter of Douglas, the deposed king of Scotland. So Elena meets somebody-or-other who is pretending to be a lost hunter but is actually the new and deposing king. Then Elena takes the lost hunter / real king to her humble but love-filled home, where she gives him wine and guess what? He falls in love with her, which is a problem because she is in love with a man who is played by a mezzo soprano who is pretending to be a man—all the while hitting those brilliant high Cs, which might, had this not been opera, be a clue: A kilt does not a man make. Anyway, the second problem is that Elena’s father is dead set: She’s gonna marry Rodrigo-or-somebody, and that makes sense because the guy is rousing up the troops to go fight the usurping king. So he gets bounty, in the form of Elena, see?

However abhorrent, it was the only thing that made sense in the opera. Nor did it help that the usurping king was Juan Diego Flores, and here, to brighten your Monday morning, is the goods:

Right—and put this guy in a king’s costume, and he becomes mouth-wateringly sexy. So the mezzo-soprano who had conquered Elena’s heart? Well, it must have taken 100 or so spinning wheels most of the winter over there in foggy and peat-smoky Scotland just to provide enough fabric to cover the poor mezzo, and however wonderful she was vocally, well, she made Eleanor Roosevelt look sexy.

“So why the fuck was she wantin’ to get it on with that,” Montalvo was wanting to know at the bus stop, and I have to remind him: This is opera, where a heroine quite naturally can ignore a sex god and go off with a cow impersonating the male sex.

“So what would you have done,” I tell him, “if you were writing this libretto?”

Montalvo is just minted 22, so he has the answer: “I woulda killed everyone of those guys, starting with that bitch Elena.”

Match in the rum factory, “How dare you call Joyce DiDonato a bitch?”

“I’m not calling her a bitch, just that Elena chick. And she’s a complete cock tease, too.”

OK—even I wondered, as I watched the darling Elena innocently invite the dashing Juan Diego Flores to repose in her humble abode…well, was that quite wise? But parenthood brings the need to champion innocence, so I tell him, my young son, “Surely you don’t believe that dear Elena will be ravished and tarnished by the first king masquerading as a lost hunter she encounters in the Scottish woods!”

His look could have started a forest fire….

Then we go on to discuss the ending, which did nothing to get the derailing train back on track. Because the usurping king wins the battle, and thus Douglas is vanquished again, and decides to go offer his life if the others will be spared.

“What the fuh? He’s gonna offer his life? The king fucking owns him! The king won! The king shoulda offed his head then and there, along with that other Niggah, who that bitch Elena got killed. But no, Elena sails in and tells the king to spare her father AND allow her to marry the fat cow, and so what does the king have to do? Look, any real guy would tell her, “listen bitch, you’re spoils of war, you know that? And your father and betrothed? Toast, baby!”

Right—Montalvo grew up in a slightly less refined neighborhood than either of the kings involved. That doesn’t mean, however, that his view of reality isn’t a bit more likely.

In fact, Montalvo’s reality was already significantly absent, since we had watched most of the crowd disembark from subtle black cars driven by chauffeurs: I suspected they were chauffeurs because how many white ladies over the age of 75 have black guys in their thirties as husbands / lovers? So we had taken the bus, which was fairly non-conventional, but Montalvo? Well, he arrived carrying his conveyance into the opera, since where could he park a skateboard?

“This is going to require massive amounts of Coke and popcorn,” I told him, since we had arrived at intermission, and after one and a half hours, what had happened? Not much, except for endless arias about the Highlanders’ love of Scotland, and the eternal love of the new king alias lost hunter for Elena. You try to make an hour and half out of that!

So we munched through the second and final act, and even though I told him, “WAIT! There’s more!” it was clear: What else could happen after the King had pardoned the life of Elena’s father and blessed the union of Elena and the mezzo? Presumably, in an act of complete self-immolation, the king could give up his first-born son to be raised in the simple and humble abode of Elena and the mezzo, and would return to gaze upon his son secretly and anguishedly, as he herded the goats and scratched his open, pus-oozing sores.

“It’s over,” cried Montalvo in a voice every bit as loud as Juan Diego Flores’ voice, and what else did he do? Right—I should have known that he was saving that last round of popcorn for the finale, and if it had only been us, showered as he heaved the contents of the bag heavenward? That would have been OK, but remember that crowd I was telling you about? The kind that get driven to the opera, and the kind who find it quite amazing that that little girl would want money for their sushi and bottle of wine, since at home, well, the girl gives them that for free. So it’s always a little problem at the theater since really, it takes these lovely and elegant ladies about ten minutes to grasp the situation, and then they have to peer into their purses, and locate what they dimly remember to be money, and then isolate it, peer at it again, smile sweetly at the girl, re-examine the money, inquire as to the price again, smile sweetly, turn to look and see if anyone in line is seeing this degrading spectacle, kiss two or three friends or acquaintances or just anybody who is obviously the same social status as they, recall that a transaction is taking place, smile again at the girl, hand the money—didn’t think we’d get there, did you?—to the girl, move away, spill some popcorn, be recalled by the girl, proffering money in return, look at the change uncomprehendingly, be explained that the popcorn and soda was $5:99 and the change is $14.01, since the elegant lady had presented a twenty—“that should do it, don’t you think?”—to the girl, never imagining that she might actually make change, since the girl at home never does, so why should this one?

Right—that was the woman, or her better-heeled sister, whom my young son had chosen to popcorn-shower / blitz at the end of three hours of simpering Elena!

“You can NEVER do that again,” I hissed, from underneath my seat, and who knew that a 6’3” guy could cower under a movie seat? Wonderful, what man is capable of, in times of danger or terror.

Well, I’m happy to say that the lady acted considerably better than anyone in my neighborhood or—especially—Montalvo’s, and more since the popcorn landed on what was the cotton-candy equivalent of hair: Heated and spun and twisted and colored into something so unnatural, and yet so lethal, since it had stopped being soft as hair but instead become a kind of razor-sharp helmet, which could have slashed us mercilessly had she charged. But she stalked away—the popcorn glistening like artificial pearls on her hair; she looked improbably like Elizabeth I as she stormed out of the theater.

So we deconstructed what little there was of the opera at the bus stop, and then the bus came, picked us up. Montalvo tails us, making faces at us through the window as he glides gracefully on his skateboard. And that’s when I realize that the social conservatives were absolutely right about the need for a two-parent environment for raising children, since how else could I have said had it not been for Mr. Fernández, my co-parent in crime?

“Your side of the family,” I tell Mr. Fernández, and we both gasp as Montalvo expertly shoots past a car intent on slaughtering him and sails over a pothole that would qualify, after the next heavy rain, for the sixth Great Lake. So we gasp, and clutch our lace handkerchiefs to our breasts, and Montalvo--operaed and Rossinied but still intact—sails into the distance.

          

   
Right--check out the king, and tell me he's not dreamy….

Squaptoring in the Tropics

Well, the world is going one way, and Marc is going the other way, and so guess what way we’re all going?

It started out well enough, when Lady called this morning: OK, well for everybody but Lady, since she developed tennis elbow from ripping off a Visa slip from the little Visa machine.  True, this seems improbable, but that actually buttresses my point, since didn’t I tell you about the world going one way? Right, so that was pre-coffee, but I did tell her that I would visit her and nurse her, as well as impersonate either Clara Barton or Florence Nightingale, and bring my leeches and bleed her.

“Get the leeches from Puerto Rico Drug, not Walgreens, since I like to know where my leeches come from….”

Right—she has this thing about local, which is why she drinks the beer made in Old San Juan when in San Juan, but wine when visiting France. So I take my walk and sit and listen to Charpentier, the Prose des Morts, about which the normally voluble Wikipedia is speechless. And why is that? It’s a knockout piece of music, and the only good thing so far to have happened today.

Then it was to the Poet’s Passage, where there is a newish smart television, and if it’s so smart, why can’t it connect by itself to the Internet? Isn’t that what a “built-in Wi-Fi” is supposed to do? And unfortunately, the only person in the café who could help me was a guy born after I started smoking, and guess what? Even that is way too old. So we figured it out: Lady has established an account with the TV, and had sensibly named it ThePausingPoet. So we logged out and established another account: TheSawingCellist.

This had occupied an hour that I was to have devoted to writing, but technological difficulties hold for me the same fascination as red capes for bulls, and with the same results. So I was snarling at a whole generation of techies, saying that I’m buying out of the whole thing until someone invents the electronic English butler.

“Good evening, Sir. May I help you?” says the television.

“Connect to the Internet, James.”

“Certainly, Sir…”

The only good thing televisonally, I realized, was that magically the vertical hold button has disappeared. So I explained this to David, the guy who was helping me connect my laptop to the television.

“Vertical hold?”

How to explain that there was a time when your television evilly decided to go manic, and began, well….how to explain it?

“Imagine that your television had a mouse pad, and someone invisible finger was scrolling madly down the pad, so that the screen was wildly going up or down…”

“Marc?”

So that was another road into melancholy, since really, who could not remember vertical hold? And speaking of which, whatever happened to Dies irae, which even now my computer red squiggles? So I asked David about that, and got the same I-don’t-know-who-let-the-Martian-into-the-café look, so I explained. Because Charpentier had written a perfectly wonderful and terrifying Dies irae, of which the translation is “day of wrath.” And who doesn’t know Mozart’s Requiem, even if you don’t, as I didn’t, know that the Dies irae was originally a 13^th century hymn by somebody or other? So I’m telling David about the Day of Judgment, and we Google and get this: “Day of wrath and doom impending, David’s word with Sybil’s blending, Heaven and earth in ashes blending.”

This seems to me perfectly wonderful, because shouldn’t there be a day of wrath for all the techies who have made my life so unbearable? Does anyone want these guys to get a free pass? Of course not, since it falls within ius naturale, or natural law, which is a convenient concept, because it means that you don’t have to justify whatever you feel is right, you just have to say that everyone feels that something is wrong, so presto! Guilty!

That, at least, is my interpretation, since am I going to read the lengthy article in Wikipedia about the whole thing? Of course not, and by the way, the guys who write incomprehensible Wikipedia articles? They’re also gonna face the day of judgment!

So I’m telling this to David, who tells me that I have to be wrong, because he read an article on Facebook that said that the pope had declared that hell didn’t exist, so how could there be a Day of Judgment?

So now it appears that God cannot do what any kindergarten teacher can do, which is to send the offending child out of the class, or down to the principal’s office, or box his ears, or whatever it takes to restore order in the classroom. So we’re about ready to look this up, since I’m convinced: The pope said no such thing, but just then the Internet got temperamental—inspired by the television?—and refused to talk to us.

So that was a problem, since I cannot for one moment be not connected, because what if Michelle Obama needed me for some reason? She writes often, always with a wonderful message: The most recent was, “Marc, you’re the best!” I deleted it without reading, because what would Barack say? He’d probably start believing in the Day of Judgment, too.

Well, I returned home, Internet-starved, and when I checked my computer, guess what? I was now bilaterally Internetless, and not feeling happy.

Into the void stepped the noise, and the noise was not of God, but of the sculptor above, which actually, as I peer at those words, is a wonderful term for God: the Sculptor Above. But this is not God, but a mere Luis, from Spain, who appeared one day and announced that he was using the apartment with permission from the owner, and that meant he could bang ceaselessly for hours.

Could he? Well, the point is that he has, but guess what developed? Beyond driving me out of the apartment and into the café, it appears—and is alleged, says the legal department—that the owner of the apartment above got foreclosed by the bank, and what did she do? She gave her keys to the sculptor, who is now a squaptor. Or maybe a sculpsquatter, or whatever it is that sculptors and squatters when combined do.

Well, it turns out that we had told the bank about this, and the bank had avowed action, but what did they do? Unfortunately, they had gone belly-up, and things had been so bad that they had—it is rumored—gone so far as to employ a santero to come in and do a ritual, which involved the sacrifice of a caiman in the boardroom. So the squaptor has been squaptorring lo these many months, and guess what?

There’s a Day of Judgment for him, too!     

Shorewood versus 53206

Perhaps nothing explains the problem better than the numbers: The clip below of Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn has gotten nearly a million hits, despite being on YouTube only since last November. But the clip of University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Professor Lois Quinn, who was commissioned by the NAACP to look at rates of incarceration of black men in the entire state of Wisconsin? It’s been up on YouTube three months longer, and has had 86 hits.

I came upon both Flynn and Quinn through a BBC video clip entitled “Why Does Wisconsin Send So Many Black People to Jail,” and that was jarring enough. Shouldn’t the BBC be writing about the mystery of Wisconsin’s famous cheeses, or the remaining legacy of Vince Lombardi in Green Bay? Sorry, guys—this is where we are now.

And I got to that clip because I had read a news story—again in the BBC—about, well, here’s a screen shot of what I saw:

  

Right, so people the world over are reading about what happened to a 19-year old black kid on the near east side of Madison, Wisconsin; it’s a place I know well, since I lived over there, and still have good friends over there. So I should know the area, the city, and the state—right?

I’m not so sure….

Certainly, the professor is a type I know well: Earnest, sincere, well-meaning. Her points are valid: It’s not just the city of Milwaukee that has an horrific are of incarceration of young black men, but the entire state of Wisconsin. And why is that? Well, the mandatory sentencing guidelines play a part, as do the stepped-up efforts of the Milwaukee Police Department to crack down on driving offenses. Why should that affect black people adversely?

Several reasons, the first of which is that the police are probably targeting the black population. But the real reason is simple: Once you have gone to jail, it is nearly impossible to stay out of jail again.

Everything is against you: The jobs that are available are not on the bus lines, so you need a car. But wait, your license has been suspended, so you drive in fear of being stopped. And even if you have a car and your license hasn’t been suspended? Well, what do you tell your boss, after you have been late three times to work this month, after all these stops?

Assuming, by the way, that there is any job at all, since telling your prospective employer you’ve been a guest of the state of Wisconsin for the last 2.4 years (the average time a prisoners spends in prison for a non-violent drug offense)? Inexplicably, it seems to have a dampening affect on the interview….

So it’s a problem, since Milwaukee has the third highest number of young black men per capita in the country, and do those guys have a high school education? A lot don’t, but it’s more than the lack of jobs and the lack of education. At one point in the clip, Quinn talks about one zip code in the inner city of Milwaukee, and I was interested to learn that she had studied it, and reported this:

This 2007 publication introduces two new sections addressing critical (and previously unexamined) issues facing the neighborhood: the unprecedented increases in subprime and high-interest rate housing loans to neighborhood residents and investors, and the growing population of ex-offenders of prime working age in the neighborhood. These new measures stand in sharp contrast with prior indicators which have generally shown relatively slow downturns and in some cases modest improvements. The new analyses, however, show substantial movement in a negative direction, particularly in the last 4-5 years as prisoners released to these neighborhoods have risen dramatically and subprime lending for refinancing mortgages has escalated.

Melancholy, isn’t it? Because apparently the neighborhood has been studied for the last twenty years, since 1993, and the neighborhood had been struggling, but not plummeting. Oh, and by the way, see that “this 2007 publication,” right up there in the first sentence of the paragraph above?  2007 was before the economic collapse, and remember, all of that subprime lending affected the poor more than the middle class or rich. No one will shed a tear for a rich guy buying ten apartments on spec to flip who then ends up shirtless, but a family who ends up on the streets, or sleeping in their car, because the bank has leant them money? All so that the bank could turn around and sell a package of mortgages to Korea? Sorry, that pulls my heartstrings.

Am I just another do-good liberal, then? Because Ed Flynn, the police chief of Milwaukee certainly lost it in the clip below, and with good reason. Yes, cops are out there putting their lives at risk while I sleep away, only waking up to go out and protest that black lives matter, but never showing up when a black kid is shot in a drive-by killing—as was the case with Flynn, during the protest—or worrying about the 80% of crime victims who are black, and their 80% of perpetrators who are black.

Nor is it really fair to point out that, statistically, crime tends to take place in the same neighborhoods as the perpetrators: If I live in zip code 53206—the zip code studied by the professor—am I going to hop a bus up to Shorewood or Fox Point to knock over a gas station?

No, the real problem is this. But wait: Let’s stop this finger-pointing and go back to basics. Ask any little black kid what he wants to be when he grows up, and what are you going to hear? That he wants to be an ex-con? A drug dealer? The biggest pimp in the neighborhood?
Don’t think so. He or she will want to be a doctor or a fireman or a policeman or a teacher. And somehow—those dreams are getting realized for little kids up in Shorewood or Fox Point, but not for 53206. And I suspect that however unequal things were in the Madison I grew up in, they are infinitely worse now. And it starts, as it always does, at the beginning: From prenatal care that is substandard in 53206 to the single-parent home to the underfunded schools to the societal norm of pushers and drug dealers on the street to the reality of drive-by killings and drug murders to gangs to school dropout rates to…. Do I have to go on?

One of Quinn’s points is that for Shorewood residents there’s a pass, when a rich kid gets in trouble with the law. He was swerving through the main drag in Shorewood with a blood alcohol level of .15? Kids will be kids! But one tangle with the law in 53206 is a life sentence.

So by all means watch the clip of Flynn, who is feeling understandably besieged. What shouldn’t you do? Read the comments by the viewers—all 5,681 comments, who may have been inflamed by the chief, as well as by the poster of the clip, Brian Solonge. He ends his introduction with this:

If black people in America dont wake up we are going to be an endangered specie like the Native American within the next 100 years,bet on it.

In order not to have to use a decade's worth of “sic” above, I will only say that the spelling and punctuation are as in the original.

So it’s a war, Shorewood versus 53206. Now then, we can fight it, or we can stop, take a deep breath, and look at all the systemic issues that keep this war going on. But for anyone disinclined to do that, let me tell you, there will never be a winner in this war. 

Not the way we’re fighting it.  

   

Ballet's Good Boy?

If there’s a moral to this story, it may be that you’re better off stupid as a post, or maybe possessed of a peasant sensibility, inclined to do hard work and happy to be paid for it. Or maybe not, since would I have known anything about Sergei Polunin had he not done the unthinkable, the unimaginable, and walked out of the  Royal Ballet, where at age 19 he had become the youngest principal dancer in the company’s history…if all of that improbable stuff hadn’t happened, would I have seen him, with millions of others last month, dancing to something called “Take me to Church?”

But I was a Lady’s house, talking about the ballet, and Lady—being significantly more in the world than I (OK, there’s Emeritus Pope Benedict)—immediately played me the clip. So I admired, I ogled, and I put that away as one of those interesting experiences: A talented dancer, a likeable tune, interesting shots. And it’s nice to see that ballet can grab seven million hits on YouTube. Yes!

A few days later, I was looking up Swan Lake on YouTube, and the site suggested “Take me to Church,” so I clicked on it again. And that led, as so often it does, to seeing the original “Take me to Church,” which has garnered 135 million hits. This would automatically disqualify it as anything I might ever imaginably see, since the shaded area of the Venn Diagram of Marc and 135 million people is impossible to imagine. But I was curious, since I read that the clip was in protest of the treatment of LGBT people in Russia.

And that was an issue, since Naïa, Lady’s 13-year old daughter, had appeared a few days earlier in tears, asking if it was true: Lady and her husband could go to jail in Russia if they said anything about gay people to Naïa. Lady gulped, and said yes.

“And Marc could go to jail, just for being gay?”

No way out: Lady had to say yes.

Naïa was silent for a moment, then turned and announced she was going to go cry in her room. Oh, and then she said…

“…I’ve lost all faith in humanity.”

Well, we both agreed: 13 is young for such an existential state. It does, however, occur to me now that that speaks more to our fortunate state than it does to the conditions of the world today.

So I called Naïa a few days later, and told her: I’m more confident about the state of humanity than I ever have been. Imagine, I said, when I was thirteen I could not even admit that I was gay, much less that one day I would marry. In fact, as a child I was terrified of my wedding day—since of course it would happen (it does to adults, right?) and I knew that I would be horribly unhappy. Oh, and also make my wife utterly miserable. So we agreed: When the Supreme Court strikes down all the marriage bans in the country, Raf and I will get married in Puerto Rico, and Naïa will be part of the wedding party.

“Marc, I was just kidding!”

So today’s conundrum: What in hell is going on in the mind of Sergei Polunin? Because I had now read that he had been born in the Ukraine, that he had been pushed into first gymnastics and then ballet at the age when most kids are contemplating the breach between kindergarten and first grade. And that came with a price, since it meant that he was separated from his mother. How did that feel? Well, according to one source, Polunin has refused to allow his mother to see any of his performances. She does, however, follow his career electronically via the fan pages.

I was then looking at the clip of why Polunin left the Royal Ballet, and the reasons stated—a need for artistic growth—seemed a little unlikely. Here, I give you the Guardian:

The fact that he was pushed into ballet training, sent off to the Royal Ballet school when he was just 13, left Polunin with a deeply conflicted relationship to his own prodigious talent. Three years ago he suddenly exited the Royal, claiming he was unable to work within the constraints of the company’s discipline. And although he subsequently moved to Russia to dance with the Stanislavsky and Novosibirsk ballet companies, he still did not settle. In September last year he announced his intention to leave ballet altogether and begin a Hollywood career, and while he is still dancing it’s unclear for how long.

While in Russia working with the Stanislavsky and Novosibirsk ballet companies, he had as a mentor—something he apparently never had—Igor somebody-or-other (and my apologies both to him and to you, since the Internet is taking an afternoon nap, or perhaps has snuck out for a little illicit Friday afternoon golf… So be warned, anything I write after this is completely unverified….)

Igor was a famous dancer, and is now choreographer for the Stanislavsky and Novosibirsk ballet companies; more importantly, he was also rich. And that, from what I remember from this morning, was the big thing. Because Polunin said that ballet is not cool, baseball is cool, since that way you can make a real killing.

Oh, and one more thing about Polunin: He likes tattoos, and one of the tattoos he sports—all of which have to be covered with makeup before each performance—is the flag of Chechnya. The Educated Readers of this blog don’t have to be reminded that there was a little unpleasantness between Russia and Chechnya, just as there is that little pebble in the path between the Ukraine and Russia, and just as there is—OK, skip the ironic tone—enormous enmity between Russia and gay people. And that was the point of “Take me to Church,” since it became to protest song for the treatment of gays in Russia. And if you have Internet, and parental advisement, you can see the clip, which features gangs of masked youth attacking and throwing onto a fire a gay man.

I’m about as stunned as I would be if I were thrown into the ring with Mohammed Ali in his prime.

And what has happened to Polunin? Is he still in Russia, and if so, in how many pieces? There’s a phenomenal talent there, but is that enough? And more, what is it that drives a dancer at the absolute pinnacle to walk away? And I asked myself…

…is it moral?

Then I thought, ‘well, haven’t I spent four hours this week doing something I really have no interest in doing?’ Because after all, I have been teaching a very nice lady English these last weeks, and five days ago, she wrote me a check. Because I teach well, does that mean I can’t walk away from it? Just because Polunin gets called “fabulous” by The New York Times, does that mean he has to crank out a decade or two of Coppelias and Nutcrackers?

There’s a difference, I say, but is there?

My head has no answer. My gut tells me that it’s unspeakably sad, the life that Polunin has had, the prices he has paid, the sacrifices he has made, but more especially, the terrible price he will pay if he has done all of this just in the pursuit of more money. People venerate the arts, worship the great artists, bring to performances all the awe and adoration that the masses brought to the church, all those centuries ago. Polunin poses the question…

…have we been wrong?