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Home » Open thread 11/18/23

Open thread 11/18/23

The New Neo Posted on by

I love the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet score, and this is one of my favorite passages. In this production, the costumes are also fabulous:

Comments

Open thread 11/18/23 — 50 Comments

  1. Thank you again for adding beauty to my days.

    I would like to ask you a favor if I may. The website for “Maggie’s Farm” is frozen on last Tuesday’s post. Some of us are getting worried about this because in the past 20 years this has never happened. If the owner is going to be absent he always has someone filling in for him.
    Favor: would you please ask around your blog post affiliates and see if they know what is going on with “Maggie’s Farm”?
    Thank you,

  2. Nice performance–thank you. Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” is also one of my favorites.

    It’s poignant that the full ballet premiered on December 30, 1938 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Three months to the day after the Munich Agreement and shortly before Czechoslovakia and the interwar Europe it was part of disappeared. I wonder if some of Brno’s high society who attended the premiere started packing after they got home. I’ll bet the Jews did. By the way, Prokofiev himself was under a travel ban in the USSR and could not attend.

    The Villa Tugendhat in Brno is on my bucket list of places to visit.

  3. I’ve always valued opera music higher than ballet one.

    But “Romeo and Juliet” is an exception, do powerful, dramatic an cathartic it is.

  5. After trying to upend Musk with assorted skirmishing, attacks and slanders, “Biden”‘s pulling out all the stops—deploying the Anti-Semitism canard—and going after Musk big time.

    Musk is hitting back.
    I wish him every and all success against those depraved and devious desperadoes.

    “Elon Musk About To Go ‘Thermonuclear’ on Media Matters for Bogus Hit Piece”—
    https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2023/11/18/elon-musk-about-to-go-thermonuclear-on-media-matters-n4924040
    https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/musk-threatens-thermonuclear-lawsuit-media-matters
    https://pjmedia.com/benbartee/2023/11/18/psychotic-ex-msnbc-propagandist-keith-olbermann-calls-for-government-to-ban-twitterx-n4924047

  6. Always loved that piece. Such a ponderous approach and usually used as such in movies.

    And, having been subjected to many a full court Society for Creative Anachronism feast day, let me assure you that dance is very similar to authentic court dances sans the emotional overtones.

    Then there are others that are quite frivolous and fun, kinda like the “Whee!” part of the ball dance in Enchanted.

  8. I want to say how much I appreciate all that Neo does on this blog. I imagine, AND HOPE, that there are THOUSANDS of devoted followers, like myself, who rarely comment but follow her every day. She seems unique in following important developments and adding her brilliant insights AND ALSO blending in discoveries about unrelated performing arts.

  12. neo:

    I got the Maya Pilsetskaya DVD and the somewhat better resolution was worth it. I’m on my third viewing. I feel I am encountering artistry of the highest caliber as well as a person I admire and consider a friend — as one does as a fan.

    –“Plisetskaya Dances / A Documentary on Maya Plisetskaya”
    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00018D51C

    Any full-length ballets on YouTube or DVD you would care to recommend?

  13. huxley:

    I originally saw that film in a movie theater when it first came out. And I saw her dance in person. Very memorable.

    The problem with the dance films is, of course, quality. They are old as well as old-fashioned, and she’s not always in her prime. Plus, dance films, even when technically good (which these aren’t), are a very poor substitute for seeing dance in person. But of course one can no longer see her in person, so I would suggest this and this. The latter isn’t a great ballet but she is so dramatic in it. There are plenty of other DVDs of other ballets and documentaries with Plisetskaya to be found on Amazon if you do a search for her name, but I’ve never seen them.

  14. RE: UFOs—Why is this subject of such immense importance, and deserving of the most intense and concentrated study by as many top notch minds as possible?

    A few reasons.

    Well, for one thing, the UFOs flitting through our skies and oceans, and apparently orbiting our Earth are presenting us with a golden opportunity to figure out the answer to the age old question of “are we alone in the Galaxy/Universe?

    More practically, you might also want to consider the current situation here on Earth, things like the rapid spread, death toll, and lingering effects from COVID, ongoing conflicts and wars, and that some of the leaders of nations possessing nuclear weapons and delivery systems (by the way, from abundant evidence it is very clear that nuclear weapons, nuclear missiles and their launch facilities, nuclear materials, research, and storage facilities are of particular interest to UFOs) are not exactly the most peaceful and stable of characters.

    Thus, as advocated by the likes of Elon Musk, Eric Weinstein, Stephen Hawking and other luminaries–to quote the Animal’s song lyrics “…we gotta get outta this place.”

    We need to find a way to spread the human race out into our Solar System and, then, out into other Solar Systems/the Galaxy to guard against a world-wide catastrophe, an “extinction event”—there are so many possibilities these days–wiping out our human race, now confined here to our one home planet.

    Perhaps if UAPs are indeed the products of vastly superior extra terrestrial intelligence we could replicate, purchase, or borrow that star-faring technology, stop relying on primitive rockets and, instead, use much more advanced methods to get out into our Solar system.

    And not just in a small, experimental way, but in a big way, with tens or hundreds of thousands of people being transported to colonies established out in our Solar System or, perhaps, in other Solar Systems as well.

    In addition, based on their observed maneuvers and according to some calculations derived from those maneuvers, these UFOs are apparently producing and using vast amounts of energy.

    Thus, the observed maneuver of taking a UFO from 80,000 feet—on the edge of space–down to hover at sea level in three quarters of a second was estimated to have required the equivalent of the entire amount of energy used by New York city in a year to accomplish.

    We could certainly use more energy sources, especially clean ones.

    Finally, perhaps knowledge about whatever non human entities (NHIs) are behind UFOs might also give us a new perspective on the development and the ancient history of the human race, and could answer the questions some people have about whether the human race has been engineered, “uplifted,” “touched up,” “worked on a little bit,” manipulated, interfered with, or perhaps just been guided by NHIs.

  15. Ask a unicorn (unicorn fleeting obsession) for all the answers to life, the universe, and everything.

    Until then, “So long, and thanks for all the fish!”

  16. the indelicate truth, is all the times we were flagellating ourselves over the Serbs, in the 90s, Bin Laden was recruiting cadres like the one who handed Daniel Pearl, over to KSM,Saed Sheikh Omar, the incurious pilot Moussaoi, the brother of Zawahiri who would resurface in Cairo in 2012, et al,

  17. I just spent a refreshing morning at the barn where our daughter boards her horse.

    It was like a step back into the 19th century. Back then most people knew how to ride and care for horses. Feeding, grooming, cleaning the stalls, working on tack and more come with owning a horse.

    The fun partis riding and it becomes more exacting and exciting when you ride the horse over jumps.

    The atmosphere at the barn was so uplifting. Dogs running about, cats napping in their corers, and horse lovers all talking endlessly about horses and riding. Lots of laughter, lots of good cheer, lots of comradery. Refreshing, when you consider the state of the world today.

    I’ve known this subculture since our daughter was a junior rider back in the 1960s and 70s. But I seldom go to the barn these days because I’m old and slow and in the way. 🙁 Today was a kind of pre-holidays get-together for pictures and a bit of publicity for the barn. I was able to stay out of the way and just enjoy the scene.

    Our daughter’s game is to buy a young thoroughbred off the racetrack and spend four or five years training it to be a Hunter-Jumper horse. She then sells it and begins again. It’s her hobby and a very satisfying one.

    Here’s a four-minute video of a hunter jumper at a small show. A nice chestnut horse with a white blaze. Looks a bit like our daughter’s present horse.
    https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=hunter+jumper+horse+show+videos&mid=3CB6E314B03DCCDAA60F3CB6E314B03DCCDAA60F&FORM=VIRE

  18. Re: Maya Plisetskaya

    neo:

    Thanks! I’m on your recommendations. Ballet is foreign territory for me. Per my standard operating procedure I look for a guide.

    Any more general recommendations for great ballet in digital format? I would would appreciate those too.

  20. miguel cervantes:

    Consider correlation and causation, or that latin statement about just because one thing follows another doesn’t necessarily mean the first caused the second. Or walking and chewing gum.

  21. this was the razorbacks preoccupation along with trying to get Barak to take a knee, Tenet who was Specter’s staffer had this peculiar habit to try to play henry higgins to Fatah, who used all these toys to wage the next intifada that Sharon dealt with,

  22. And the Boned Looser returns.

    Others have noted that sanctions regarding Vladistan and oil, or machine tools being sold by EU members to Vladistan aren’t being enforced. See Ukraine Matters on YouTube from 11/16/2023. Boned Looser approves?

  23. we have to do this, because the shambling oaf sold off our oil to Xi and other interested parties, can anybody run a railroad,

  24. huxley:

    Yes, also this, although the director got WAY too “creative” with the camera angles.

    This isn’t ballet, but it’s great. It’s on YouTube in 5 parts. Unfortunately the video quality is abominable. But it’s still worth watching.

    This is also a video of terrible quality. But the dance is a favorite of mine. It’s in 2 parts on YouTube. Here’s Part 2.

  26. From the story Banned Lizard linked to:

    “Since the European Union sanctions took effect in February, Russian shipments to Dortyol totaled 2.7 million barrels, or more than 69 percent of the fuel oil shipped by sea to Dortyol during that period.

    Also since February, The Post found, Dortyol has shipped 7 million barrels of fuel oil overall, of which 4.2 million barrels went to Motor Oil Hellas. Those shipments accounted for at least 56 percent of all the fuel oil the Greek refinery received by ship.

    The precise amount of Russian-origin fuel oil in the products the Pentagon purchases could not be determined. Those products are refined using multiple ingredients that cannot all be tracked through production.

    It also could not be determined whether, at some point during its journey, the fuel oil from Russia was relabeled as having come from another country.”

    This is really a nothingburger, since the US consumes 20 million barrels of oil a day, but it does highlight how porous and ineffective the sanctions have been.
    Rather than criticizing the administration for thinking they were so smart they could collapse the Russian economy which would lead to Putin’s demise, um attacks Banned Lizard, as if BL is responsible for the administration’s ineptitude.

    Um, it’s time to take your head out of the sand.

  28. neo:

    I ponder the decline of ballet which you ably document.

    How could anyone forget Pilsetskaya’s unified perfection between her upper and lower body?

    Clearly they did.

    But it’s not any different in novels and film.

  30. Brain E:

    Heard about the sanctions shenagins before Banned Lizard made his post. It’s more than oil, maroon.

    That’s you Brain E, maroon.

    More than 300,000 Russian casualties since Vladdy started his quest, to free Ukraine from the unconstitutional tyrants in Kiev, or whatever fig leaf you hide behind now.

    Brain E, Mr. Pragmatism, Making Imperial Russia Great ……

  31. neo:

    UFOs can do all things mystical and magical, more than a mere Unicorn or even a herd (passel?) of Unicorns?

  32. huxley:

    Yes, many arts have declined. I think it’s partly a choice and partly a lack of some sort of outlook and depth and life experience. With ballet, it was definitely a choice to make technique more important than anything, and the most ugly parts of technique, at that. In other words – get that leg to 180 degrees, which makes for an ugly line. My teachers used to say “that’s gymnastics, not ballet,” and they were right. But once that became the required aesthetic there was no turning back. It’s also the case that there are a lot more young girls and women who are hyper-flexible than there are artists who have the whole package. Of course, you can’t be a ballet dancer without being flexible. But hyper-flexible? No; that shouldn’t be a requirement. But now it is.

    Nor am I interested in someone who can do 10 turns in one preparation, if there’s nothing particularly interesting in the way that person moves.

    In other forms of art, I think the decline is for different reasons. In poetry, for example, technique went out the window.

  33. The ballet segment makes a nice companion piece to the unicorn tapestries, which are not much older than the play, given the slower pace of the era.
    Per Wikipedia: Romeo and Juliet belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity. The plot is based on an Italian tale written by Matteo Bandello and translated into verse as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke in 1562 and retold in prose in Palace of Pleasure by William Painter in 1567. Shakespeare borrowed heavily from both but expanded the plot by developing a number of supporting characters, in particular Mercutio and Paris. Believed to have been written between 1591 and 1595, the play was first published in a quarto version in 1597.

  34. @ Oligonicella > “that dance is very similar to authentic court dances”

    Such was my thought as well. I never participated in SCA, although familiar with some who do, but at one time did some research into Renaissance dances. The solo steps for the men were transferred wholesale to ballet.

    If you pick the right dances, you can see the elements that have persevered in folk dancing, and even some footwork that would be at home in a Broadway production.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pelrp8bw38k
    Tourdillon, gagliarda e volta

    Best resource for those interested:
    https://www.loc.gov/collections/dance-instruction-manuals-from-1490-to-1920/articles-and-essays/western-social-dance-an-overview-of-the-collection/renaissance-dance/

    The video clips used to play directly from the links, but now you have to download the files (.MPEG) and then paly them.

  37. And Instapundit jump on the “Compare and Contrast” bandwagon…sort of….

    Strands of The Narrative(TM) converge…(as they ultimately MUST)…since it’s the only game in (DC) town…
    ‘ THE “INSURRECTION” WAS AS GENUINE AS THE “RUSSIAN COLLUSION.” ‘—
    https://instapundit.com/617821/

    “RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT…characterize the Biden administration…”
    (Wellll…DESTRUCTION—oops, make that TRANSFORMATION—by any other name…)
    https://instapundit.com/617786/

    + Bonus:
    Oy Vey, Honest A.’s at it again….sigh….
    “WHOSE SIDE IS BLINKEN ON?…”
    https://instapundit.com/617831/
    Yay!! Take it away, Honest A.!!

    File under: Malley-able….

  40. Nuclear Modernisation – Rearmament, ageing stockpiles and why Russia’s nukes work (probably) – Perun

    The full title.

    Posting from phone, computer is down.

  41. I have no illusions about the Russians, like a bear you slap them down, as trump did in deir er zour and shamkhoun airbase,

  42. Hubert, my son and his Slovak wife both studied medicine in Brno, and it’s less than 2 hours away from our flat in Bratislava. Neither nearly as beautiful as Prague, tho I’m less enthusiastic than most.

    Need a bit of a Gaza break.

    Here’s a bit of nice modern only a bit better than fine amateurs could do in a newish song that probably won’t be a hit but is like a B+ song from The 1975:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJOzUpNaD6Y&list=PLSJkIg_k31H-il-rxsoqqepcvZqAiPpUv&index=5

    Now, back to the outrage…

  43. Tom Grey: Bratislava (German: Pressburg) is also on my list. I’ve long been fascinated by the smaller countries and territories of Europe during the interwar period (1918-1938): Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland; Danzig; Memel; the Baltic states; and Romania. Alan Furst covers this territory in his spy novels. Since you live in the neighborhood, you might give them a try if you haven’t already. Also “A Time of Gifts” by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a book that has been mentioned before on this forum (by Zaphod, IIRC).

    I’ve collected old National Geographics from the 1930s with photo essays on those countries; I also picked up Margaret Bourke-White’s and Erskine Caldwell’s photo book “North of the Danube”. It has lots of photos showing what interwar Czechoslovakia looked like. Irony: most of the photos were taken in 1938, but the book was published in March 1939–the month the Wehrmacht annexed the rest of the country. So the world the book portrayed–including a photo of Jewish children studying in a cheder in a Carpathian shtetl–was already being destroyed as it went to press.

    I visited Czechoslovakia once: a day trip from Munich to Plzen in the summer of 1991, less than two years after the Wall came down. Plzen, like Brno, was/is a factory city (the Skoda Works); a lot of the old Habsburg-era housing stock still looked like it probably did in 1914. There was a museum off the main square dedicated to the Allied liberation and occupation of Plzen in May-November 1945. It was touching and funny. Among the displays were old packs of American cigarettes, packets of GI toilet paper, and other GI kit.

    Anyway, thanks for the on-site information. If I do eventually make it to Prague, Brno, and Bratislava, it’ll probably be from points north.

    Gaza: I’ve refrained from commenting on that, having decided that my words are either inadequate or smack of armchair bloodthirstiness. What matters are actions. Glad to see that Israel is taking them. May they continue until the job is done.

  46. What’s Going On With Shipping? has the rundown on the Galaxy Leader hijacking:
    https://youtu.be/–3B0KgX-Ug?si=81mMT7yNqjC1DL7Q

    Just a suggestion: sink every Huthi/Yemeni naval vessel on the water, use subs, planes, whatever attack means feasible. Give no warning. Just put them all on the bottom and the message will get through. Do it now.

  48. In other forms of art, I think the decline is for different reasons. In poetry, for example, technique went out the window.

    –neo

    I have a dog in this hunt. A few thoughts.

    There is no question that poetry technique — meter, rhyme, standard forms — largely went out the window. However, for me much of the new poetry was liberating and high quality. Walt Whitman. William Carlos Williams. Ezra Pound. The Black Mountain and Beat poets.

    Most of the 1930-1960 poetry published in the quality literary magazines did very little for me, though that poetry had a ton of technique. I cast my bit with the underdogs.

    Then, weirdly, though I didn’t notice at the time, my side won. The old technique guard died off. Academia went left, radical and postmodern. The art world did too, which I consider a factor, since poetry and art are linked. The poetry world was no longer polarized into two large warring camps.

    However, poetry had lost its middle-brow audience — for which both the high technique and the radical poets share blame. Without an audience aside from other poets, poetry has spiraled off into its own little world.

  49. They had to burn down the poetic village to save it.

    But the peasants didn’t understand the victory.

  50. Re: Arts in decline

    Susan Sontag was the intellectual 60s “It Girl.” Here’s a Sontag quote from her published journals about her efforts to expand the canon of art to include lower forms of art such as camp and burlesque.
    _________________________________

    I assumed the preeminence of the canonical treasures of the past. The transgressions I was applauding seemed altogether salutary, given what I took to be the unimpaired strength of the old taboos….

    What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand) was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large.…

    Barbarism is one name for what was taking over. Let’s use Nietzsche’s term: we had entered, really entered, the age of nihilism.

    –Susan Sontag
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/susan-sontag
    _________________________________

    Sontag was surprised how easily a few casural shoves could overturn centuries of pride and tradition in serious Western culture. She even apparently came to regret it.

    WW II? The threat of nuclear war?

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