the Fantasy Based Community

[pan]

A place to monitor the unreal, the bizarre, the slack-jawed...

[waldopaper]

dam dood... don't be keepin me in suspense!  How did the reading go? 

[pan]

We lost one Mormon virgin from the cast - she said she was afraid what her parents would say - she really winced when we were talking about Brandon and Valerie and one of the cast blurted out that Valerie could have saved her sacred skin but still given in to Brandon by anal means.

S'ok.  We have a strong cast and we were a little concerned when we cast her, our devising methodology requires collaborators/performers who are willing to take bold choices without worrying about looking silly.  We have nine folks who have worked with us before so they know what to expect and one singer who will have to be coaxed along.

After the read-thru - with much discussion - a cast member sent me an email that found connections between "we are every one, we are every other one" with memes and Nazis.  I started a brainstorming google doc to explore the themes of the libretto that they have started to contribute to - damn! you are reaching my wee spiders over here in Spudland.

The singing rehearsals really have been great - their voices blend beautifully and the vocal director gets the jokes.  She also is a bit of a wonk on German pronunciation which works quite well as I wouldn't have had a clue.  Hearing the singing of your words makes me love Robert's score even more as he has clearly understood your rhythms and reinforced them with his composition.

[Mouse]

Ah, dears, so 

[Mouse]

Oh I so do so do so do

want to talk to you

[waldopaper]

Now we belong to the Ages. 

“Let us pray that the terrible historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through terror and pity; and may fulfillment verify in the end those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity.”   –Herman Melville  

The thing about Melville was he was so fucking obtuse.  Yet we have somebody whom all the specialists now canonize as a literary lion trying as hard he could to frame the fucking American Civil War.  The same war is going on today on the same American content.  We split hairs. 

“(Weird John Brown), The meteor of the war.”  Melville’s Battle Pieces still languish before most scholars of American Literature.  Most still hold opinion, whether voiced or not, that Melville burned himself out on Moby-Dick.  At least it is true most readers do. 

It is lacking sharpness or quickness in sensibility difficult to comprehend the obtuse of Melville or whiteness of snow.  What seems obvious melts with application of words.  We see the elephant in the room.  Naming the great Manitou is not as easy as it sounds. 

The riddle of the qualia has no stock answer yet.  Writing is not rocket science.  Great Literature is.  “Gaunt the shadow on your green, “pens Melville drawing the canon lanyard.  “Shenandoah!”  Jeff Daniels plays buckless Yooper on Little Round Top.  Bayonets, eh?  

Why the War Came in which Fehrenbacher writes, “Slaveholders felt both physically threatened and morally degraded by the antislavery crusade.”  Now the slaveholders are shareholders “…with their own elaborate appeals to history, scripture and racial theory.” 

Precedent, text and hierarchy create slaveholder value even when physics seems to flunk.  Papa primed post-modern and the granddaughters try running from crazy.  Historic tragedy kindles bards of Progress and Humanity (when the moon is in the seventh house). 

Melville seems obtuse because Progress and Humanity appear obtuse.  If events lack sharpness or quickness in sensibility, words describing them with clarity and precision resemble either a Brady photograph or a Renoir painting.  The camera obscures art like computers change code. 

Nothing seems to stop the bad movie.  Walk out and it still plays in your head.  Sleep on the ground, awake before light, step in ill-fitting shoes and lob chunks at the mob coming from another direction in twilight afternoon.  Bullet blisters black powder night stabbing phlegm. 

Dreams and false alarms still cloak the Great Manitou of Hosts gathering in shape-shifter puddles.  Neither Killer Angels nor Team of Rivals prevent Melville or Monet shouting at the screen, “Don’t go back there!”  They always do in 19^th century horror movie matinee. 

Bourse Said festival back in the day.   

 

 

[pan]

“Slaveholders felt both physically threatened and morally degraded by the antislavery crusade.”

So the idea that objecting to the objectifiers is oppressive to the oppressors isn't just a recent rationalization.  Sophistry, after all, was created for some ancient Greeks who prized their democracy - for the citizens who, by definition were the white male landowners.  I should be surprised that sophistry has always been put into service of the 1%.

[BO]

Speaking of racism, slavery, and how the civil war never really ended in the south, you might want to check out Chris Hedges article this week. (The comment section is even more enlightening...and frightening.)

White Power to the Rescue

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/white_power_to_the_rescue_20130...

'Now slaveholders are shareholders.' Yep.

[pan]

"Once you have seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something." -- Arundhati Roy, author, The Progressive magazine, April 2001, p39

[pan]

Love this quote from Uri Avnery's After Bibi’s Apology, Reflect on the Idiocy of Attacking the Gaza Flotilla

 Is it just that power not only corrupts, as Lord Acton famously pronounced, but also stupefies (in the sense of making people stupid)?

[waldopaper]

Here some interesting shit I ran over while following other shit... like dreams and their relationship to long-term memory and my own approaching dementia. 

G. William Domhoff is a psychologist and sociologist at UC Santa Cruz.  He does statistical tracking on dreams, and as an added lick, has articulated precisely Who Rules America for the last 40 or so fucking years.  

Small wonder few us sniffed out The Real Reason for the Iraq War or Your Favorite Disney Love Songs. 

Fantasy Based Community. 

[pan]

I still watch national broadcast news - don't know why - maybe to see all the ads for Pharma.   Yesterday the lead story was about the baby prince, followed by the Pope being swarmed in Brazil.  On ABC the final story was a retrospective on Diana.  The fortunate thing is, with all that celebrating celebrity time, they didn't have any puff pieces about an actor in the newest movie ("how Hugh Jackman feels about his chicken breast training diet for the newest super hero film").

[pan]

Yet another example of climate change deniers pointing to cold/snow weather somewhere as "evidence" that it a a vast conspiracy by algore and libruls to take away our freedom!

In the midst of July, Brazil gets snow and temperatures below zero Centigrade

What these geniuses conveniently neglect to acknowledge is that winter in Brazil is during summer for the Northern Hemisphere.