Slow blog posts

"Sloth" by Thowra_uk on flickr

Perhaps the reason that I write so few blog posts is that I take sooooooooooooo long to write them! I must try some fast ones.

Britten Sinfonia: Britten in America

"Nico Muhly, through the window of Kaffibarinn" by Roo Reynolds on flickr

During my violin lesson on Friday my teacher Gabrielle mentioned that she was off to see Pekka Kuusisto play with the Britten Sinfonia at West Road. Gabrielle’s great at discovering interesting players with vibrant technique, and remembering what she’d said about the last time she’d seen Pekka play with the Britten Sinfonia I was keen to go along, but pretty doubtful there’d be any tickets left. So I checked the the box office and the website, but it was too late – the few remaining tickets had been handed over to the venue. Given that Kate’s not a Britten fan I wasn’t hopeful, but the programme looked so amazing I was keen to try:

Purcell Fantasia VII in C minor
Purcell arr. Muhly Let the Night Perish (Job’s Curse)
Purcell Fantasia XIII in F ‘Upon one Note’
Tippett A Lament, from Divertimento on ‘Sellinger’s Round’
Britten Les Illuminations, Op. 18
Steve Reich Duet
Nico Muhly New work (World première tour)
John Adams Shaker Loops

To add to the excitement Pekka and Nico were down to do a pre-concert talk at 19:00. I knew that Nico’s pre-concert talks were liable to be entertaining from a blog post (or should I say blog rant) he wrote about naff questions at pre-concert talks: http://nicomuhly.com/news/2010/always-funny/

It worked out well. We dropped tochter and her friends at Bella Italia and then wandered over to West Road and brought one of the few pairs of tickets left

The pre-concert talk was suitably amazing, Nico talked extensively about his responses to Britten and Reich and tried to get Pekka to reflect on the differences (and similarities) in his playing as he approaches the romantic repertoire he’s famed for and modern / contemporary pieces. I spent a (wonderful) week in Finland once, in Tampere, and one lasting memory is that the Finns aren’t big fans of small-talk. As a Quaker you’d think I’d be up for long silences but even I was challenged! Pekka’s impish wit was perfect for entertaining and informing us the audience, but a full answer to Nico’s interesting question would have been intriguing.

Pekka and Nico were planning to do the pre-concert talk over a musical backing and were playing some violin loops through a Line 6 DL4, but a mixture of strange electrical interference and us oldies inability to distinguish talking from background noise. Shame though, it may have been a fun happening!

The concert itself was amazing – I’ve been spoilt by some great concerts over the last year but this was a cracker. The Purcell was beautiful, Pekka’s technique is flamboyant but the resulting sound is very delicate.

One aspect of Pekka’s playing that did make me smile was his bow hold – he olds the bow some way up the stick, not adjacent to the frog. Earlier in the day Gabrielle had been correcting my hold as it kept slipping up the stick, towards Pekka’s

The Tippett was a revelation, not the architectural eclectic Tippett I’ve heard before. A touching little piece inspired by Purcell’s Dido’s Lament. I’m going to keep an eye out for performances of the whole of his Divertimento on ‘Sellinger’s Round’.

Next up was Britten’s Les Illuminations. I’ve heard several recordings of this (Spotify has a Pears/Britten one, along with other recordings) but I wasn’t prepared for how beautiful it sounded live. Pekka and the Britten Sinfonia brought a haunting fragility to the playing that perfectly complimented Mark Padmore’s expressive narrative tenor singing.

The second half started with an exciting performance of Reich’s Duet. How Pekka and Jacqueline Shave kept their line as what they were playing wove in and out of each other is a mystery. Beautiful and high energy stuff.

Nico Muhly’s piece was great. It’s always exciting to hear the premier of a piece and this was so expertly written for Pekka, the Britten Sinfonia, and Mark Padmore that even Kate – not a fan of contemporary classical stuff – loved it. The programme really showed it off too, bringing out the Britten like evocative qualities and the Reichian energy. The end of the piece reminded me of Andrew Bird (the Line 6 box had put me in mind of him earlier) as it called for Pekka to play and to whistle.

If I had to criticise anything it would be the programming of Adams’ Shaker Loops. It’s a wonderful piece, and the string orchestra version gave us another opportunity to hear Pekka’s wonderful playing. But. After the Reich and the Muhly it would have been nice to have a greater change of scene – perhaps moving the Tippett to the end of the concert.

West Road was the first UK date for this concert (after performances across The Netherlands), but if you are near Dartington tonight, London’s Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on Monday, Christ Church in Cockermouth on Tuesday, Southampton on Thursday, or Norwich on Friday, then do check it out.

http://www.brittensinfonia.com/concerts/events/view/britten-in-america-nico-muhly

"Pekka Kuusisto" by brittensinfonia on flickr

Extremely rude embroidery; is it a good idea?

Detail from the lacework "Having Lunch Downtown" by Danica Maier at the London Printworks Trust

Over recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in crafts traditionally considered feminine: knitting, lace-making, crochet, embroidery and things like that. Some of this renewed interest results in pretty pieces, while some takes a more ironic stance. I first encountered the latter in an exhibition called "Adam and Eve it" at the London Printworks Trust which I read about in the Observer and attended back in 2005. The exhibition contained large-scale but detailed wall mounted pornographic images made from lace (or made like lace) by artists Danica Maier and Miranda Whall (a detail from Maier’s work "Have Lunch Downtown" heads this post). Intriguing. The next time I came across this use of ironic reflection in needlework was when researching "scary wool". Two pieces of subversive cross stitch came up: "Hasty" by beefrank and "rage" by laurelann.

"Hasty" by beefrank on flickr

"rage" by laurelann on flickr

Although I came across theses works afresh, I think they are actually in turn quotations themselves, "hasty fellatio" being a Merlin Mann quote. But it works so well in cross stitch, the prim tone of the wording compliments the medium but confounds the meaning.

The question is where do you go from there? As us, the audience, become accustomed to seeing edgy subjects rendered into lace and cross stitch and embroidery how do artists maintain their shock value?

There seem several answers to this. One is to not bother, and many people getting into these crafts are just knitting or embroidering to produce nice work. For example I came across "Free Form embroidery on recycled silk" by davis.jacque on Jamie Chalmer’s amazing mr x stich blog http://www.mrxstitch.com/

"Free Form embroidery on recycled silk" by davis.jacque on flickr

Jacque’s work isn’t overly cutesy, but nor is it overtly edgy or ironic, it’s just fun.

The second response to escalating audience familiarity is subtle: somehow to keep the edge but drop the irony. I’m not sure how to explain this one (or even if I’ve correctly categorised it) but a good example, again from mr x stitch’s blog, is Marty’s Fiber Musings series "Pretty Ladies in Smart Hats"

"Peaches…and cream" by Martys Fiber Musings on flickr

The third path, and the one that prompted this blog post, is to escalate the shock-value of the content to match the increased audience familiarity. This, I think, is a mistake, though it may still result in highly accomplished highly skilful work. The trouble is that it’s an arms race we really do not want to get into. The example that got me thinking comes from DonkeyWolf’s blog, and is the work "Cream Pie" by Ruby42

"Cream Pie" by Ruby42 on flickr

Like mr x stitch, DonkeyWolf includes ‘Not Safe for Work’ (NSFW) postings in the blog, by which they mean that the images included (should you ignore the warning and look at the NSFW posts) are not what you’d want on your screen in the office if the boss walks in. In fact, for many of the pieces covered I think they need a ‘Not Safe for work, home, or anywhere else’ warning as some of the needlework shown is extremely pornographic. Luckily Ruby42’s embroidered and cross stitch cushion has a safe side, with a recipe for cream pie on (shown above). The other side is very rude. If you’re unsure what might be on it the wikipedia disambiguation page for ‘Cream Pie’ might help, after that, if you want to see, and have no-one looking over your shoulder at your screen here’s the link to Ruby42’s picture on flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruby42/4239289319/in/set-72157616384571874/) and to donkeywolf’s post (http://donkeywolf.blogspot.com/2009/10/not-safe-for-work-swap.html) but be warned, they are extremely pornographic, despite being rendered in embroidery.

Now I may be wrong, the motivation for these NSFW needlework pieces may not be an ironic and shocking subversion of our attitudes to feminine crafts, but I think it is. And the trouble with such pieces is that what is required to shock the audience escalates out-of-hand. I think that the work often covered in mr x stitch and donkeywolf’s blogs’ Not Safe For Work feature have already crossed the pale.

Luckily there is a fourth way: to ‘go meta’. One can become ironic about the irony itself. This is done to wonderful effect by Stitch Out Loud with her "Come closer Bob!" on flickr:

"Come closer Bob!" by Stitch Out Loud on flickr

Spotify playlist for just Chapter 12 (“Grimes! Grimes!” The Passion of Benjamin Britten) from Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise

"beach sunrise" by thornypup

I’m an avid Spotify fan and an avid classical music fan. Over Christmas it was great to finally sit down and get reading Alex Ross’ amazing book "The Rest is Noise" in which he surveys twentieth century classical music. It is an amazing work, stretching to 591 pages. At times it’s too good. One reads Ross describing the works he loves and get so swept up in his descriptions that when you stop and listen to the piece you are left wondering what medications he’s on, and where to buy them

In the book each chapter focuses on a composer, an event, a piece, or a period and brings in piece after piece to contrast and explain the historic people and events. As an appendix he also includes a list of key recordings, and he does the same thing on his blog.

And there’s the problem. Today I found (thanks to a twitter shout out from @spotify retweeting @afront) a fabulous looking blog presenting classical music playlists on spotify: http://www.spotifyclassical.com/ One of ulyssestone’s posts is a Spotify playlist of Ross’ book. Here it is http://open.spotify.com/user/ulyssestone/playlist/50wC6eKC0EImYi20GnWPvH (you’ll need spotify for this to work, sorry. I do have some spare invites if you are in the UK and cannot get in). But although @ulyssestoone has rendered Ross’ iTunes playlist into Spotify, neither capture anything like the wealth of information and the texture of the book. So I’ve attempted to render just one chapter, my favourite, chapter twelve titled "Grimes! Grimes!" to a Spotify playlist. It’s enormous, and even so I had to miss a few pieces that Ross mentions but Spotify do not have (e.g. Britten’s Curlew River). What started out as an exercise to build a companion playlist to the chapter ended up, I think, too huge to be of use (with 664 tracks!), but here it is. Enjoy! http://open.spotify.com/user/dumbledad/playlist/7lRRFKUI1OExQvEDYiM6p3

"The Rest Is Noise" photo by marklarson

Where’s the place to be, if you are a young designer?

A couple of weeks ago I joined Richard Banks for the second of Jon Rogers’ Ideas Days at Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone school of design. The format is simple. In their third of four years students on the Innovative Product Design course that Jon leads work up 100 ideas for their final year project and then present 25 of them to a visiting group of experts. Then all the students come together to quiz the experts in a panel session. Last year I joined Anab Jain, Bill Gaver, NCR’s Charlie Rohan, Nic Villar, and Richard Banks.

This year brought Andrew Shoben, Bill Gaver, Daljit Singh, Richard Banks and I together for the panel (the NCR folk couldn’t stay after the ‘100 Ideas’).

I love watching panels where the panellists disagree – especially where they respect each others work. Last year Anab and Bill hade a heated debate about the similarities and differences between commercial and university based design (especially product, interaction, and service design). This year I think the most passionate disagreement came in response to a question asked by Eilidh Marshall. Eilidh asked “Where’s the ‘place to be’ for designers now?”

The answers were, well, odd. Andrew answered “On the web”. Indeed the web can be thought of as a place but that is a curiously 1990’s idea. Now, the community-like tools on the internet can be taken for granted and used as just that – tools. It is true that a web presence is important for designers, but it’s not really what I’d class as ‘the place to be’.

Next up Daljit talked about the lure of London. At the time I thought Daljit had missed the point, but reflecting back now after discussions with Pete Thomas I think Daljit may have been on-the-money. Some (or all!) of the current third year are thinking of setting up a design collective in Dundee when they finish, so Eilidh’s question may indeed have been “do we need to move to the capital?” If it was, then I’m glad I didn’t take Eilidh’s question that way as my answer may have brought me under fire! Regional (and national) pride leads to some truly amazing high-energy developments, but I always think that it is most rewarding to try to work where the best in your profession are. Even if you don’t think you’ll ever be one of them it sure ups your game to be surrounded by them. Try this. Ask yourself which composers lived in Paris at the dawn of the twentieth century? You might answer Ravel, Fauré, Debussy, Satie, etc. Now ask yourself which composers lived in Lille at the dawn of the twentieth century?

As I mentioned I love watching panels where the panellists disagree. Friend and colleague Richard and I provided that. Richard answered that it didn’t really matter where you were, and talked about his experience working with us in Microsoft’s Cambridge lab while still living in Egham. He gets around this commuting nightmare by coming in two days a week and working from home the others. Because of Richard’s diligence and our working style (most visitors and team meetings are on Monday and Wednesdays) it works. But I think, especially for a design role, more face time would be better. Design is not just about prettier pixels (though Richard’s designs are elegant), it’s about a way of thinking about a problem, a way of solving it, and a way of documenting one’s solutions. I think we’d benefit if more of the design way of work bled into the other disciplines represented on Richard and my team. And that requires more face time.

But to wrap up I wanted to give Eilidh a straightforward place based answer. Bill suggested his institution (Goldsmiths) so I went for ITP in the Tisch School of Arts in New York. It’s an amazing place and combines inventive insights, creativity, and remarkably little ego politics. Inspirational.

(N.B. On the plane home, I wondered why Berlin hadn’t sprung to mind for any of us. When the wall came down there was a sense that Berlin would take over as a design or cultural capital for Europe, which doesn’t seem to have happened; or has it? There was a series on BBC Radio 3 recently to mark the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall looking at exactly that – the cultural legacy. We also had Pat visit (he’s now Hasso Plattner Institute in Berlin/Potsdam) so perhaps there’s more to think through about Berlin’s changing role. I’ll save that for another post.)

==================== EDIT ====================

Richard pointed out another write-up of the same event by some of the Dundee students present: http://unboxdesign.blogspot.com/2009/11/ideas-day.html

Can’t get a Screw for years and then two opportunities come at once

I’ve been looking forward to a production of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of The Screw coming round and now two have turned up! It’s got a very weird plot, which I won’t go into here but you can read about on Wikipedia. First off the Cambridge University Opera Society are doing it in the cloister of Trinity College tonight and then on Saturday and Sunday. Will and I are going tonight. Then the ENO are reviving their McVicar production this Autumn.

ENO has extra info (some video and an excellent podcast) and Spotify has the EMI / Virgin Classics recording available (with Daniel Harding, Ian Bostridge, Joan Rodgers, Julian Leang, Caroline Wise, Jane Henschel,  & Vivian Tierney)

========== EDIT ==========

Wow, you know you’ve seen a great production when you spend the following day listening to the opera again and again. I’ve had that with Partenope at the ENO and with Rusalka and Norma at Seattle Opera. Last night I had it when Will and I went to Cambridge University Opera Society’s The Turn of The Screw. If you are in Cambridge and they have any tickets for Saturday or Sunday I’d snap them up. I’m tempted to go again on Sunday!

The standard was set high by tenor Pablo Strong and pianist Rupert Compston. The opening is so evocative and beautiful, yet also spooky that despite it’s brevity it is very important to the opera. Strong was perfect.

Despite the high bar set by Strong and Compston the rest of the cast were fantastic. Will and I had seen the female leads Joanna Songi and Fiona Mackay (playing the governess and Mrs Grose) in the CUOS production of Eugine Onegin. Songi in particular had such clear diction it was easy to follow the plot.

The two kids, Miles and Flora, were played by women (Katy Ambrose and Verity Trynka-Watson). I thought that might be a problem but the casting was clever in that the singers playing adults were markedly taller than Ambrose  and Trynka-Watson. Miles’ role is so important for this opera and Ambrose’s beautiful singing is still ringing hauntingly around my head the day after.

Another pivotal role is Peter Quint, played last night by Matt Sandy. He was dressed a little bit like a long trousered Billy Bunter, and when I walked past him chatting with the other cast members in the interval he seemed an affable chap. But in character, especially at the opera’s finale, he got it right and was menacingly eerie. It makes me shiver just recalling his performance!

I wanted to add a huge shout-out to the orchestra. It was a small ensemble and most of them had demanding solo roles through the piece which they all handled wonderfully. In good Britten style the percussionist, Jonathan Pease, was rushed off his feet.

So – a fabulous production of what is now one of my favourite operas!

==========================

I forgot to add the twitter operaplot summaries to my original post. Here they are:

http://theomniscientmussel.com/2009/05/operaplot-entries-round-2/#t

@idmbassoon – take a summer job in the country watching 2 nice kids? great! wait…you didn’t mention the crazy ghosts.
D. Kim – Prudish lady moves into country estate. Governess for two creepy kids. Add two sexy ghosts. One big happy family. NOT.
@primalamusica – It’s just like The Sound of Music, but with ghosts & Freudian angst instead of schmaltz & Nazis. And the kids are even creepier
@amndw2 – Kids sing creepy rhymes. Ghosts sing creepy invitations. Yeats is alluded to. Musical duel (governess vs. ghost) kills kid. Malo!

Twitterdee and Twitterdum

John Tenniel’s illustration reproduced on Wikipedia

There are two ways I think about the development of twitter. One is to think of it as an extension of the status messages people set in instant messaging applications like MSN Messenger. Instead of the bland ‘online’ or ‘away’ followed by one’s screen moniker people started changing their names to convey more about what was happening, or just for humorous reasons. This works, for people on your buddy-list but as we saw with the growth of blogging and live journal it’s often easier to broadcast than to choose laboriously which friends should see something. This sense that twitter was all about broadcasting brief status messages is made obvious in Jack Dorsey’s original sketch for the service that became twitter.

“twttr sketch” by Jack Dorsey on flickr

Twitter is not alone in providing an easy and effective way to broadcast your status to your friends. Most social network sites also provide this facility. Facebook does, and it provides an application that will automatically copy any status updates (called tweets) that you put on twitter onto Facebook.

That brings me to the other way of thinking about twitter. Twitter tweets are limited to the size of an SMS message so that the updates can be sent naturally from mobile-phones. That would be 160 characters but I think because of smaller SMS sizes in the USA it’s an 140 character limit. So one can also see twitter as the origin of micro-blogging, not just using tweets for status updates but to use them for anything you can blog about in 140 characters. This artful use of a status broadcast service lives happily alongside status updates, because the distinction between a status updates and other things one might blog about is indistinct, but recently the difference caught me out.

“Death by Recit” by John and Keturah on flickr

Marcia Adair (aka The Omniscient Mussel) ran her #operaplot competition for the second time. I missed it first time but this time had a star judge and great prizes. The idea is to summarise opera plots as tweets, i.e. to fit the entire plot into 140 characters including the #operaplot tag. You can browse through the amazing results on twitter, or collated into a long list by The Omniscient Mussel here: http://theomniscientmussel.com/2009/05/operaplot-entries-round-2/ and I posted all mine in a blog post earlier. Lots of the summaries people came up with were funny, several limericks, some summaries of the whole ring cycle, etc. For one humorous one I thought I’d do the  first opera I remember going to see, Philip Glass’ Akhnaten at the English National Opera. I went with my Mum back in 1984. Now if I’ve got the date right I was 19 at the time and my strongest memory is of the huge sand stage on which the new city that Akhnaten builds was slowly constructed in miniature. Oh, and that Akhnaten was a hermaphrodite. He’s sung by a counter-tenor, but as a young lad I didn’t know that so all I saw was a topless soprano on stage in a loincloth. Imagine my surprise when the loincloth comes of (to make way for ceremonial robes if I recall correctly) and he’s definitely a man! Anyway this could all be my memory playing tricks on me, but here’s the 130 character plot summary I cam up with for Akhnaten and posted to twitter:

Singer with gorgeous tits and loincloth builds new city to new god on sandpit stage. Off comes loincloth and there’s a willy too!

I was immersed in the fun of The Omniscient Mussel’s #operaplot quiz so I failed to remember that this tweet of mine would be picked up and would automatically become my Facebook status. I’m sure you can imagine the consternation of my present (and past) colleagues that I’m connected to on Facebook!

John Donne

I’ve been concentrating my poetry reading on John Donne recently as he seems to be popping into my life. Firstly, back in February 2008 we rented the fabulous Coburg House in Old Hastings and one of our day trips was to Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage on the remote deserted Dungeness beach. Well it would be remote and deserted were it not for the tourists like us flocking to Prospect Cottage. One of the beautiful and unusual things that Jarman had done was to quote a John Donne poem in jigsaw cut wooden font on the side wall, pictured above. It’s a quote from “The Sunne Rising”. Here’s the full poem [with the bits Derek Jarman missed out in square brackets].

The Sunne Rising

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?
Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide
Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,
Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
Call countrey ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,
Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.

[Thy beames, so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou thinke?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,
Whether both the'India's of spice and Myne
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.
Aske for those Kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.

She'is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes doe but play us; compar'd to this,
All honor's mimique; All wealth alchimie.]
Thou sunne art halfe as happy’as wee,
In that the world’s contracted thus;
Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee
To warme the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art every where;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.

I also found reference to this poem in Jeffrey Wainwright’s “Poetry: The Basics” where he includes this indelicate limerick as response to Donne’s poem:

There once was a poet called Donne
Who said ‘Piss off!’ to the sunne:
The sunne said ‘Jack,
Get out of the sack,
The girl that you’re with is a nun.’

Secondly, on Friday the 13th of March Will and I went down to London to see the recent Met / ENO production of John Adam’s opera Dr Atomic. At the heart of Dr Atomic is a poem, John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV” that “provided the stimulus for Oppenheimer’s whimsical naming of the test site: Trinity”. It’s an amazing poem and you can see why Oppenheimer loved it.

Holy Sonnet XIV

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Wow. I was eager to follow that up with more of Donne’s Holy Sonnets so scanned our bedtime poetry reading bookshelf for an anthology that might have them in. A recent favourite came up trumps, Boris Ford’s anthology “Benjamin Britten’s Poets: An Anthology of the Poems He Set to Music”, a wonderful and eclectic set of poems, has Donne’s Holy Sonnets in.

Lastly, as speculation rose about Carol Ann Duffy’s possible ascension to Poet Laureate I spent the week re-reading some of her work. Before I get to her Donne choice here’s a quick limerick I wrote to condense to a tweet celebrating the announcement that she’d been appointed Poet Laureate:

Poet Laureates tend to be men
And certainly not lesbian
This Scots lass is bent
But with great enjambment
We love reading again and again

One of the Carol Ann Duffy books I love is called “Out of Fashion”. In it Duffy asks contemporary poets to choose an old poem about dress, fashion, clothing, or undressing and to set it against one of their own. The anthology ends with Duffy’s own poem “Elegy” followed by her choice of partner poem, John Donne’s “To his Mistress Going to Bed”.

To his Mistress Going to Bed

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tir’d with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s Zone glistering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime,
Tells me from you, that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th’hill’s shadow steals.
Off with that wiry Coronet and shew
The hairy Diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread
In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven’s Angels used to be
Received by men; Thou Angel bringst with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright. 
    Licence my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. 
    Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s balls, cast in men’s views,
That when a fool’s eye lighteth on a Gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus array’d;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see reveal’d. Then since that I may know;
As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew
Thy self: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,
There is no penance due to innocence. 
    To teach thee, I am naked first; why then
What needst thou have more covering than a man.

The Omniscient Mussel hasn’t lost the twitter #operaplot

I’d not seen this before but The Omniscient Mussel has just kicked off the second run of her competition to summarise opera plots into twitter tweets. That gives you 140 characters minus the obligatory #operaplot tag.

Danielle De Niese is a judge (hence the picture at the head of this post) and the prizes include a pair of top price tickets and a complimentary bottle of champagne to the first night of Glyndebourne’s iconic production of Guilio Cesare on May 22nd – featuring Sarah Connolly in the title role and Danielle De Niese as Cleopatra and 4 Box seats to a ENO’s new production of Cosi fan tutte directed by Abbas Kiarostami. How cool is that? I’ve made a start – jump in!

You can search recent ones here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23operaplot and here are mine so far (sorry about the rude word in the Akhnaten synopsis) …

1) Ralph Vaughan Williams, Riders to the Sea.

5 of 6 sons drowned. Last son off to market in storm. Whoops, all 6 now drowned! Time to relax about the sea.

2) Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes.

Sailor abuse; sea; sailor abuse; sea; teacher abuse; sea; child abuse; sea; death; sea

3) George Frideric Handel, Acis and Galatea

♀ ♥ shepherd. Shepherd ♥ ♀. Giant ♥ cherry lipped ♀. Giant kills shepherd. ♀ = divinity. God turns dead shepherd into fountain.

4) George Frideric Handel, Acis and Galatea, recent Royal Opera House production.

Stunning ♀ amazing voice has to wear rag-doll wig and perform next to lithe dancer in sheer bodystocking

5) Philip Glass, Akhnaten

Singer with gorgeous tits and loincloth builds new city to new god on sandpit stage. Off comes loincloth and there’s a willy too!

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And another …

6) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Così Fan Tutte

Women eh! You recon? You’re on. ‘Told ya.

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And another …

7) Antonín Dvořák, Rusalka

Fishy tale of bored teen seeking love. Čury mury fuk. Teen silenced, but her chatty lover lacks constancy. Watery graves for all.

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And another (trying to fit in with the current #operaplot craze for limericks) …

8 ) Georges Bizet, Carmen

Men are thinking of sin/as factory girl takes a spin/Love is all bull/the cave only half full/& she’s dead to the cheering within

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Last one, written after getting home from Sunday night’s final performance of the Cambridge Handel Opera Group’s production of

9 ) George Frideric Handel, Ariodante

Genevra loves and dad approves? Too happy for an #operaplot so much ado about nothing brings sadness and death before virtue triumphs again

Why I don’t like Facebook

“Adult Female Phidippus Mystaceus” by Opo Terser on flickr

I like things that do one thing and do it well, but the history of the internet seems to pendulum between specialisation and generalisation, between divergence and convergence. I wasn’t around for the beginning but I do remember when even search and download was split between different niches (WAIS, Gopher, FTP, etc). Then as the internet was popularised some ISPs provided a walled garden so that all your internet needs might be provided by one site, the AOL (or other) portal. But as the usefulness of the web continued to grow that model was impossible. The web itself moved from and information sharing application to a platform and so called Web 2.0 saw lots of great social applications developed on the web. But this complexity seems to have baffled and people increasingly seem to use one portal, often Facebook, for everything. I can share photos on Facebook (though I prefer flickr) , I can publish my status on Facebook (though I prefer twitter), heck if me and the recipients are both on Facebook I can send email on Facebook (though I prefer Outlook). I do use Facebook; there are some friends I keep up with just that way, but I wish it wasn’t taking over so much.

If I’m right that this is a pendulum I shouldn’t have to wait long before a new bread of specialised applications break us out of the Facebook centric world. Bring it on.