So Aida is set to open in three weeks, meaning we are halfway through our rehearsal process. (We have five weeks of room rehearsal before we go into tech–a blissful exception to the short rehearsal process rule in opera in America.) The opera is almost fully staged and certain scenes are already in great shape–notably the scenes that are better suited to a chamber approach in Act III. But the one scene that hasn’t been tackled yet in its entirety is the one which makes everyone’s eyebrows raise at the thought of a “chamber Aida”–the enormous ‘triumphal march’ of Act II. It’s been kept off mostly because of scheduling conflicts, but in many ways it’s good to save this deceptive scene for the last. (We finish staging it tomorrow, incidentally.)Why deceptive? First off, you have to wonder what on earth Egypt is celebrating as a triumph when the very next scene has Radames planning for war again, and with the same exact enemy. As I mention in my program notes (which I published last week), isn’t the whole scene a musical iteration of the “Mission Accomplished” sign hanging over George Bush well before anything was accomplished in Iraq?
Archive for June, 2007
More Aida Blogs
Saturday, June 30th, 2007Luminous Survielance
Saturday, June 30th, 2007
Via BLDG | BLOG
Steampunk Laptop
Saturday, June 30th, 2007
Steampunk Computer
Saturday, June 30th, 2007
Better then the iPhone
Saturday, June 30th, 2007
Rusty Tunnels
Friday, June 29th, 2007
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I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore
Thursday, June 28th, 2007Color and Copyright
Sunday, June 24th, 2007“Pantone asserts,” says Wikipedia, “that their lists of color numbers and pigment values are the intellectual property of Pantone and free use of the list is not allowed” (which didn’t stop the Scottish parliament debating whether to specify the Scottish flag, legally, as Pantone 300).We humans are so reliant on our systems of description and standardization that we often mistake them for the things they describe. Whoever can assert ownership of the description system can assert ownership of the thing described. Like any unnecessary extension of ownership or copyright, this is on the whole a rather bad thing. Think of Craig Venter trying to patent life itself.
Would the genius who could codify and describe smell (and so far nobody has come up with a way to do it) be considered some kind of “owner of smell”? Would such a system refresh and rebrand the whole image of smell, and could it be tied into dozens of marketing campaigns? Would it take substantial advertising to remind us that we have noses, and that noses smell things, and that this is, by and large, a pleasure?
On the plus side, when somebody invests in something as general as colour or smell, they sink a lot of money into increasing our awareness of it. And consumer choice (much more pathetically narrow than it’s held up to be) really is widened by, say, the Play! Color! phone range — no other range of phones comes in anything like twenty different colours. And what happens when you pick out the colour you want, and leave the store, is that the ranged, Platonic, theoretical, proprietorial Pantone colour system — the langue of colour, the colour strategy itself — turns into a particular, personal colour choice, a commitment: colour as parole, a “speech act”, a tactic, a hack, an act of praxis.
OMFG Awesome! ! !
Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
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