The AH Coffee Shop and Reading Room 09

[NuclearFairy]

I've always wanted to see someone choreograph a ballet to several of the Offsprings songs.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Please always remember, and don't ever forget, when you're at the opera, "It ain't over until the fat lady sings!"

I'm not an opera fan, but I'll admit that there are some arias, taken on their own, that are truly beautiful. Butt (as TxRad would say), I don't want to sit through the whole thing to hear one song. I also dislike musicals. My wife loves them and plays them constantly in the car.

Plays are OK. Ballet I like, but ballet suffers from the same "over-dramatic" disease that hurts opera. Silvie Guillem (important, now retired French dancer) once had a web site where she gave a very brief summary of every ballet libretto. They were all, "she dies," "she's already dead," "she's going to die," "she died and came back," etc. It was hilarious.

 

[iwatchus]

I love much of Carmen but I am a big Bizet fan. That was the first opera I tried

 

[NotWise]

I've always wanted to see someone choreograph a ballet to several of the Offsprings songs.

I'm trying to get my daughter to do one based on Dvorak's Rusalka (an adaptation of the German fairy tale romance Undine). The story is similar to The Little Mermaid, but without the tragic ending. I researched it a little, and it seems like no major company has ever done it.

 

[MrPixel]

Tonight's (final) opera performance went well. Again a big crowd, so 'tween last night and tonight, roughly 400-500 saw the show. Amazing, actually. I personally had a good time tonight. Last night, not so much - my reeds were giving me absolute hell. I was missing entrances, and out of tune when the SOB would deign to make a sound. Spent half the afternoon adjusting other reeds in the stash, and therefore had a good "evening at the opera."

After the performance I went to my "usual" bar for a beer to unwind... only to find the leading male and female vocalists chatting-up the barkeep. This tavern is nowhere near the venue, yet it turned out that the out-of-town cast was frequenting the place after every rehearsal. Sorry I missed them!

 

[NotWise]

All this talk of opera.

One of my daughters and her husband had a date night last night, to dinner in Santa Fe and to Die Valcure at the Santa Fe Opera.

They skipped the extended family dinner out, which leads to the memorial for my wife's cousin this afternoon.

My Summer Lovin' story (if I can finish it in time) takes place at a conference in Santa Fe. A night at The Marriage of Figaro is one of the conference events, which they decline in favor of pizza and sex.

Right now I feel like the days are too short and/or my energy level is too low.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

Getting ready to head out to Seney to do some bird watching. Hope everyone is getting by while I am gone ...

 

[colddiesel]

I love much of Carmen but I am a big Bizet fan. That was the first opera I tried

Carmen's the best, all the best songs are in the first Act so leave at the interval and you won't miss anything.

 

[filthytrancendence]

Good morning everyone!

Coffee's out, and I made some biscuits and put out some butter, jam and honey.

Didn't get as much writing done as I hoped yesterday, but still respectable progress. I did, however, find out I've got an apartment to move into after I get back from Texas. As usual, lots of changes all at once. Good news is, I don't have a lot to move immediately. Bad news is, it's the kick in the ass I needed to finish emptying out my storage unit that's sitting 4 hours away. So August is going to be a busy month

 

[iwatchus]

Thanks filthy. Good news on the apartment and good luck with all the moving.

I am happy with the state of my novel, but sitting it aside for a day to see if my SO is going to be able to give me any more feedback. I think I will submit it as 8 pieces or so, 1-3 chapters per. In the interim, I have started on a spinoff of my original series, my first attempt at writing any real BDSM.

 

[yowser]

How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.- Gioachino Rossini

 

[GrantBricksly]

Let me know when it posts. I am looking forward to reading it!

Chapter 4 is live as of this morning!

 

[NotWise]

I struggled to add 600+ words to my WIP, found the result to be boring, and backed up. The only parts of the 600+ words that anyone wants to read can be shortened to a few lines of dialog. It did include some setting that I may need to keep in, but not very much.

 

[MrPixel]

I'm having fun with the opera thing I just endured experienced - introducing a new character in the story named after one of the opera characters. Her parents are Mozart aficionados.

 

[NotWise]

The memorial for my wife's cousin was interesting. Other cousins came in from Texas, Tennessee and California, but most of the guests were friends of his daughter and step daughter, and mostly around 30.

It was a Jewish memorial with a presiding Rabbi at a picnic area in the mountains. His daughter wore a black evening gown with white tennis shoes. She has jet black hair, and wore dark lipstick and makeup to go with the gown. She stripped the dress off as soon as the Rabbi concluded the service and spent the rest of the afternoon in a tee-shirt and shorts.

I expect her friends broke out the pot once the cousins were gone. Her father was a life-long pot head, so that's appropriate.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

Okay, uh, I've got the coffee brewing, but that's it. You're on your own for finding stuff to dunk in it.

 

[filthytrancendence]

I'm sorry I woke up late everybody. Thanks, @JuanSeiszFitzHall. I set out some doughnuts.

I started watching Foundation yesterday, because my best friend keeps telling me how good season 3 is. I skipped it initially because it seemed like season 1 is pretty mediocre. And it is. Interesting how post-war optimism seems to have infected even the conception of a galaxy-spanning totalitarian space empire, and how almost pollyanna that feels these days. Especially knowing what I know about 40k, which definitely seemed to be cribbing from Asimov's notes.

Foundation (the source material, not the show) seems like one of those things that's... uhm... pretty foundational to a lot of later sci-fi writers. Except it's not one of those foundational works like LoTR that remains unsurpassed for many decades. Nearly every interesting idea in Foundation has been iterated on a half dozen times and made far better and more interesting than it was in the source. Kinda an anti-LoTR in that way. I see lots of it in Red Mars, too, and every parallel I can think of is substantially improved and more thoughtful than the original execution seems to have been.

 

[NuclearFairy]

Foundation (the source material, not the show) seems like one of those things that's... uhm... pretty foundational to a lot of later sci-fi writers. Except it's not one of those foundational works like LoTR that remains unsurpassed for many decades. Nearly every interesting idea in Foundation has been iterated on a half dozen times and made far better and more interesting than it was in the source. Kinda an anti-LoTR in that way. I see lots of it in Red Mars, too, and every parallel I can think of there is substantially improved and more thoughtful than the original execution seems to have been.

I've read a lot of Asimov, but I'm terrible at remembering names to things. Can you help jog my memory about what Foundation was about?

 

[NotWise]

For those lacking a sweet tooth, I'll throw in some bagels and cream cheese.

 

[GrantBricksly]

For those lacking a sweet tooth, I'll throw in some bagels and cream cheese.

Add some lox and you have my attention

 

[MrPixel]

[Hang on while I refill my cup. Thx, JSFH.] [OK. Back.]

Ohgawd, the earworms. I can't get the opera out of my head. Given five rehearsals and two performances, the repetition was going to take a toll. Make. It. Stop.

Pamina - the story character I named after the opera character - just made a date with the FMC. This is going to be fun!

 

[NotWise]

I brought in from the garden: four cucumbers, three gladiola spikes, and my first jalapeno of the season. Many more to come.

One technical opinion out the door this morning. Two reports to finish.

I hit a slow segment in my WIP, which I need to hurry on for the Summer Lovin' contest. Solving the slow bit gave my an organizational idea for the story that might help move things on.

One of the interesting things at the memorial yesterday was an old family photo album. It focused mostly on my wife's paternal grandparents, and covered roughly 1914 to her grandfather's 90th birthday in 1984. He passed away a few months later.

The photo album included a couple pictures of me from the early 80s. I kept my hair long for about ten years, but there are few photos of me from that time. Apparently the cousins didn't know or forgot that I used to have hair over my shoulders, and their reactions surprised me. My kids knew it, but maybe they never saw a photo.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Did you stay until the fat lady sang? And did the cast give you an encore performance at the bar?

Tonight's (final) opera performance went well. Again a big crowd, so 'tween last night and tonight, roughly 400-500 saw the show. Amazing, actually. I personally had a good time tonight. Last night, not so much - my reeds were giving me absolute hell. I was missing entrances, and out of tune when the SOB would deign to make a sound. Spent half the afternoon adjusting other reeds in the stash, and therefore had a good "evening at the opera."

After the performance I went to my "usual" bar for a beer to unwind... only to find the leading male and female vocalists chatting-up the barkeep. This tavern is nowhere near the venue, yet it turned out that the out-of-town cast was frequenting the place after every rehearsal. Sorry I missed them!

 

[MrPixel]

Did you stay until the fat lady sang? And did the cast give you an encore performance at the bar?

Had to. Orchestra gets the final word on everything. No performance at the bar, it was only the leading actors/vocalists anyway. Was surprised to find out they were a real couple, not just on stage, and that they were doing it as a joint project with the music director and his friend as producer. They all met at a Mozart festival last year.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

On the way to Green Bay and the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field ...

Although with the temperature in the 90's, it's not too frozen ...