Skip to main content

The Busy Platypus and Das Rheingold (In Brief)

April is the cruelest month around here -but May brings graduation.  In the meantime, we've had school plays and parent education nights.  Banquets, theses, and recitals are all on their way.

In the midst of this hustle and bustle, we did find time last weekend to see Houston Grand Opera's production of Wagner's Das Rheingold.  It was the first Wagner piece I've seen and I have never experienced anything like it.  The Spanish company that put together the production pulled out all the stops and made a show that ran two-and-a-half-hours without intermission seem short.  The avant-guard staging with strong elements of cyber-punk left me with the feel that all the best parts of Final Fantasy VI and VII had suddenly been apotheosed.  And while we're on the topic of pop-entertainment, I'll add that like Jackson's ring cycle, I have to wait a whole year for the next installment.  Pop-culture aside, I was particularly impressed how the costumes, staging, and set design were able to underscore the themes of class, exploitation, environmentalism, and technology that dominate Wagner's story.  The disturbing images of factories destroying golden babies and fortresses made of human beings spoke loud and clear in a way that horned-helmets don't these days.  That's good, because given Houston's history with race, class, Big Oil, and human trafficking, Wagner's got some things the city needs to hear.   
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

Tolkien's Dark Tower: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXVI

Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower."  Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost.  Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been.  We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus.  The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned."  The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion.  This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley).  Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...
4 comments
Read more

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....
10 comments
Read more