Good night, and thanks for all the eye-candy!

As usual, rollick has given us a fantastic blow-by-blow of last night's meet-up, so there's no cause for me to do the same. I wasn't as alert as I wanted to be anyway--I kept feeling I was giving off distracted disinterested vibes. Nevertheless, I was engaged with the crowd on a very visceral level.

Here are three quotes from that evening. Can you guess who each was said of? (For extra bonus points, name the speaker in each case.)

1. "You just want to get him dirty. You know that underneath that is a white t-shirt that's just got to go!"
2. "He's even cuter face-to-face than he is online!"
3. "My God, those cheekbones!...[And] that smile is beautiful."

Der Traurigste bin ich von allen!

Okay, I'm officially sick of not having my boyfriend around.

I was doing okay until Sunday, when I woke up with a headache. I forced fluids like nobody's business in the hopes that it was mere dehydration, but it persisted to the point where I took aspirin--something I only do maybe a handful of times a year. I ate, in the hopes it was a hunger headache. I tried to go back to sleep, in the hopes that it was brought on by too little. I still felt bad.

It was one of those moments when I was lying in bed not sleeping, too bleary to read, too tired to think of getting out of bed and doing anything when I thought I really wish Monshu were next to me. Not that he would've been, had he been home; he doubtless would have had some work to do. Once or twice he would've come in to lie with me for a little while to help me nod off. But that would've been enough. As rollick said recently, there's nothing like illness--or the threat of it--to make you appreciate having an s.o. If I want to go out and have fun, there are any number of people I can call, some on relatively short notice. But there's many fewer that would come to my bed if I were lying there ill and even fewer that would think to check on me if I were in that state.

Fortunately, this turned out to be nothing serious. I woke on Monday feeling fine--and had an attack of dizziness and nausea an hour later that sent me back to bed. I had planned on working as short a day as possible so that I could come back early and rest up for the opera that night, so I figured it was just as well. I got plenty more sleep, but not enough to keep me from fading during the last half-hour or so of the five-hour performance. As long as I was reasonably engaged by the drama on stage--which was most of the time, outside of the interminable exposition of the movie-length second act--my weariness went away and I no longer noticed my headache.

Clearly, then, this coloured my opinion of Die Walküre. It's not an especially informed opnion anyway--it's my first time seeing or hearing it all the way through and only my fourth Wagner opera ever--but enough of you have asked for it that I'll go ahead and give it.

The singers were excellent. Morris, Voight, Eaglen--they can do no wrong. True, Eaglen's a house on two legs and Voight hardly looks only one night pregnant, but they can both do more than stand and sing. The blocking could've been more helpful: It was particularly silly to have Brünnhilde descends a glowing staircase to speak to Siegmund and then exit backstage right as if she's thinking, "Oh, as long as I've made the trip to Midgard, I might as well get some shopping in before the battle." A curtain is drawn over the staircase after her exit anyway; she should've bidden Siegmund farewell from the bottom steps as the curtain closed over her and then we could've assumed an ascent to Valhalla without putting poor Eaglen through any of it.

Still, this was a minor problem compared to absolutely senseless running around in Act 1, Scene 1. The worst of it is Hunding finding his unhappy wife at home alone with a strange man who he instantly distrusts (for damn solid reasons, as it turns out) and then spending most of the evening looking away as she makes googly eyes at the stranger and all but shines a spotlight on the sword. Perhaps he sensed the complete lack of sexual tension between these two but, he must have heard the incredibly passionate music accompanying their every stolen glance. Studebaker, our Siegmund, also had trouble at the upper end of his range. His voice grew weak on exactly those notes you wanted to hear him nail.

Things steadily improved, however, particularly after the entrance of Lipovsek. I've never heard her sing before, but I hope to again. She made Fricke--one of the dullest characters in Norse myths, without a doubt--into a hot damn bitch on wheels. She starts out the victim of her husband's scheming and sleeping around and ends up completely breaking his will and forcing him to do her bidding. You GO, Goddess! Nuphy thought Morris undersang a bit as Wotan, but I thought his quiet measured delivery made him sound every bit the aging god who's simply Seen Too Much. (There was one point, when Wotan laments that, as the god of laws, he's more bound by them than anyone else, that I wanted to shout out, "No, dude, that's Tyr! You're the god of spooky shit and rage; you're good.")

Still, the most beautiful scenes were those between Wotan and Brünnhilde at the end, when she's begging him not to punish her. It was a damn shame that I was so exhausted by then I could hardly keep my eyes open. I literally thought I wouldn't even have the strength to clap, but the audience's response was so energetic--I can't remember ever hearing so much shouting in the opera house! You'da thunk it was the Met!--that it perked me up. You couldn't refrain from rewarding those singers after what they went through. And the audience's appreciation made me forgive them some of their rowdiness during the money aria and their tittering during Fricke and Wotan's tiff.

I liked the set design a lot and wished the stage direction had exploited it effectively. During the overture, the Norns spin a huge circle of rope around the centre of the stage, reminding you both of their background involvement and of the ring itself. The circle stays for the entire act and so much could've been done with it and the constellation of Hunding and the incestuous siblings--but wasn't. Oh, and I just had to mention that the rock on which Brünnhilde will have to surrender her virginity is just incredibly vaginal.

I know I haven't said much about the music, but that's the part I feel least qualified to judge. It's dense, modern, and intricate and all I can do is pick out the occasional Leitmotiv. Nuphy claims it doesn't excerpt well and it certainly does have more impact when you can listen to the themes develop and interact over a lengthy period of time. But I was so addled, I found snippets of other tunes floating into my head (particularly Zep's "Immigrant song"--THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH welcomerain!).

"He's agglutinative and I'm isolating; it was doomed from the start!"

Back when rollick invited my commentary regarding wolfieboy's suggestion that we compare ourselves to languages" I didn't mean to be such a buzzstomp. After all, it's a cute idea. It's not that languages don't have distinctive individual characteristics, it's just that none of the ones wolfieboy atrributed to English (e.g. configurability, usefulness, annoyingness, etc.) seem particularly distinctive.

( Technical details follow )

I want his mind!

It was characteristic of the state I was in at last night's meet-up that when rollick teased welcomerain about ordering a piece of pie, I gabbled something utterly incoherent about the non-fiction book I'm currently reading. (welcomerain refused to believe that there was no subtitle, but I just double-checked it and all I see is Mappings in thought and language.)

( Fair warning: It was written by a Frenchman! )