Apophenia Watch

As Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress prepare to pass a massive stimulus bill, the word "massive" is on everybody's lips. Apart from fostering lewd puns involving the words "massive" and "stimulus", I can't see why this adjective should have monopolized our descriptions of a spending bill like that. What a boring word to be in vogue. It just means "big", you guys.

"My Child Is A Crack Baby At..."

A little while ago, I saw a bumper sticker reading "Spoons are for stirring coffee." They are indeed, but it's only because of the other anti-drug stickers on the car that I knew that the driver was staking out an anti-heroin position. As uncontroversial as it was, it got me thinking that there's room in the market for pro-heroin bumper stickers.

Two that came to mind were, "Junkies do it between the toes," and "I (silhouette of a syringe) NY." Ashley suggested "Spoons aren't just for stirring coffee anymore." Of course, junkies don't typically have much disposable income, so this may have to remain one of those good ideas that never leaves the ground. Story of my life, friends.

Bro!

We certainly don't know much about musical theater around here, but we know that like Hair or Porgy and Bess, writing a musical about a subculture is a terrific way to bring attention to their unique values, attitudes, and folkways. Or better yet, to mock them! With that in mind, it's time somebody wrote a musical about bros, the young people who populate our reality TV shows and who vomit off the railings of our apartment complexes, yet remain invisible to the art world. I refuse to believe that "Animal House" is a sufficient treatment of such a broad subject. Surely bro culture has made meaningful progress since the Carter Administration.

I'm not sympathetic to what is basically a very dumb youth movement, but bros are people like the rest of us. We may not like to admit it, but don't we all like beer? Although their baseball caps and polo shirts may seem off-putting, all of us can appreciate the unique narrative conflict their lifestyle implies. What is drinking yourself into a stupor, after all, but Man versus Self? When a bro seduces a bro-ette, it hardly needs a very skilled playwright to bring out the hostility. Whichever way you look, you can hardly deny that bros have problems, and problems means stories.

The possible settings are as numberless and varied as the bros themselves: An apartment littered with pizza boxes and decorated with flattened beer cases, the quad of a state university, or the bleachers of a football game. And from the opening of Act 2, which finds two bros scribbling on their passed-out friend with Sharpies (Song: What a fag!) to the climactic party that ends with the cops being called, there would be plenty of engaging scenes. Playing off the homosexual subtext of bro culture might seem cheap, but I think it could provide some of the piece's most tender moments (Song: You're my bro, slurred boisterously in Act 1, then meaningfully reprised in the final act, or maybe Don't leave me, bro!)

The chances of a musical success might be hindered by the fact that bro music is universally considered terrible. A talented composer might be able to fashion something that sounded bro-ish yet listenable, but he would be unable to capture its main feature: An incredible loudness that obliterates any possibility of conversation. The theater might not seem like a good venue for a musical tradition that prides itself on thumping bass, forgettable lyrics and little discernable melody, but the existence of atonal opera suggests that the boundaries of musical theater are set far wider than it may seem. And not to knock musicals in general, but the modern theatergoer is simply in no position to complain if Bro the Musical turns out to be unlistenable. Compared to what, we might ask.

I'd write the book myself, but, as I'm sure you've noticed, my talent for narrative fiction is limited. So I'm going to relinquish the idea to the budding playwrights out there. All you need is actors who can vomit on cue and a way to make the whole theater smell like Axe, and you'll have a license to print money.

Someday We'll Live In A World Without Love

While we're on the subject of the opera, I think the amount and prevalence of love in operas is shameful. I don't mean to say that love itself is unappealing, or that musical productions should be interrupted for car chases and gunfights (although I'm not not saying that). I don't mean to take a seven year-old's attitude towards love. I think it's just fine for two people to love each other. But almost every opera that I can think of bases its plot around love. Love frustrated, love triumphant, love love love. I'm sure this appeals to some people (board of directors, I'm looking at you), but for various reasons it strikes me that love and operas don't mix.

Operas provide us with two or three hours, a fraction of which is used to establish each character, and an even smaller fraction of which may be used to establish interpersonal relationships. All the falling-in-love, all the sweet nothings and all the loving must happen in real time. There can be no montage in the opera world. With these time constraints, the figures in an opera can scarcely be more than types. Reasons of plot or character may require one cipher to love another, but it's hardly enough to build a whole theme on. Even if the characters are well-drawn, and characters seldom are, it can hardly be anything novel. If you've seen two people in love, you've seen them all.

Perhaps I hold a minority perspective. The general public can't seem to get enough loving, whether on stage or screen. Notwithstanding that it's good to be in love, what is there to say? If two people are in love, they really really like each other, and that's all there is to it. The public's apparent desire to see an endless series of fundamentally similar love scenes play to predictable and familiar conclusions suggests a more lurid form of entertainment. I, for one, don't want to watch sublimated pornography.

Without really inspired wordplay, it's difficult to infuse new interest in the tired idea of love. Operas, however, are seldom known for their lyrics. (Quick! Name a librettist). While most librettos are merely a series of by-the numbers emotion songs (e.g. The Queen of the Night's famous aria: "I am very angry" ), a creative approach would do well to ditch love altogether. Countless books, plays, poems and screenplays have been written in which love is completely absent. Although the move away from romatic plots has been greater in modern times, several of Shakespeare's plays, including some of his most popular, have scarcely any love. Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Timon of Athens, not to mention Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe and etc. manage to concern themselves with plots less trite than questions of who thinks who is sexy.

So I ask you, why are operas stuck in this romantic ditch? I assume some of it relates to the need to find meaningful roles for women, and in the past, women were known primarily for their lovin'. (Although King Lear, which is chockablock with women, has never been made into an opera). Perhaps it is merely a sad fact of history that women's liberation happened after classical music died a natural death. As for modern operas, Nixon in China abandons the concept of love, but it throws out the baby with the bathwater, being too modern and minimal to have much of a plot at all.

Maybe it doesn't matter. John Adams can do what he wants, but opera is as dead as Caesar, and everybody knows it. It doesn't really matter what anybody does now; that canon isn't getting any bigger. People may think they know why the grand opera died out, but if you ask me, twas beauty killed the beast.

A Plague of WASPs

From the Metropolitan Opera's Board of Directors:

Glen W. Bowersock
Van Cliburn
O. Delton Harrison, Jr.
Hartley R. Rogers
Miss Leontyne Price
Winthrop Rutherfurd, Jr.
Mrs. Bryant Reeve Dunn
Harrison LeFrak
Langdon van Norden, Jr.
Evelyn M. M. Popp