The art of the coloratura soprano

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Artfldgr”]

I’m not a big opera fan, although there are a couple of operas I love and with which I’m very familiar. But I have the deepest admiration for the skill and artistry of opera singers, who can do something that almost seems superhuman to me. I don’t sing very well, even in the pop sense, and although I can sort of carry a tune, the most you can say for my voice—as a voice teacher once told me—is that it’s “not unpleasant.” And he was trying to be nice.

So to me, opera singers do something unimaginable. The tones, the power, the projection! Plus the feeling and the acting. And then there are the languages.

Opera singers are usually not very young, because it takes quite a while to develop the entire package. But here’s a young lady of eighteen I find very impressive indeed. Wow, what a pure tone, what effortlessness combined with power (that’s the idea, right)?:

Even within the opera world, coloratura sopranos don’t tend to be my favorite type of singer—although again, my admiration for them knows no bounds. I seem to prefer a certain depth of tone, even in a soprano. Somehow, this type of soprano sounds almost freakish; otherwordly. But Janeckova’s voice is like velvet, and her highest notes show no strain that I can hear, unlike some of the others. If she sounds otherwordly, that other world would be the celestial one.

Here’s a wonderful video that is a compendium of many coloraturas of the past. Of all of them in this clip, I prefer Moffo:

Tariff on Canadian softwood lumber

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the latest salvo in a trade war, one that’s been going on for quite a while:

U.S. President Donald Trump intensified a trade dispute with Canada, slapping tariffs of up to 24 percent on imported softwood lumber in a move that drew swift criticism from the Canadian government, which vowed to sue if needed.

Trump announced the new tariff at a White House gathering of conservative journalists, shortly before the Commerce Department said it would impose countervailing duties ranging from 3 percent to 24.1 percent on Canadian lumber producers including West Fraser Timber Co.

“We’re going to be putting a 20 percent tax on softwood lumber coming in — tariff on softwood coming into the United States from Canada,” Trump said Monday, according to a tweet by Charlie Spiering, a White House correspondent for Breitbart News. A White House official confirmed the comment.

The step escalates an economic battle among neighboring countries that normally have one of the friendliest international relationships in the world. It follows a fight over a new Canadian milk policy that U.S. producers say violates the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“Canada has made business for our dairy farmers in Wisconsin and other border states very difficult. We will not stand for this. Watch!” Trump said in a tweet Tuesday morning.

This really is a longstanding issue:

Since the early 1980s, the U.S. has argued with Canada over how much softwood lumber the country’s suppliers can sell in the U.S. and at what price. The two nations have negotiated temporary agreements in previous years over softwood, which comes from trees that have cones, like pine or spruce, and is preferred by builders for constructing home frames.

But hammering out a new deal has been slow-going for the Trump administration, which still doesn’t have its chief trade negotiator in place.

“Hammering out a new deal”—nice metaphor for building with wood.

The appropriation of Anne Frank

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed this recent post by William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection entitled, “I warned you about the Anne Frank Center (US).” The subject is a group that appropriates Anne Frank’s name for political purposes:

It’s unlikely that until Trump’s election you heard of an entity calling itself the “Anne Frank Center (US).” That’s because for most of its history, AFCUS has quietly done work educating people about Anne Frank.

Then in the spring of 2016 everything changed. AFCUS changed its focus, hired a political activist named Steven Goldstein, and began to reposition itself as a social justice organization.

AFCUS has, since Trump’s election, issued a series of inflammatory statements that get gobbled up by the media looking to bash Trump.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least, because I had noticed a somewhat-related phenomenon recently; they’re not the only ones. Take a look at this article from the Times of Israel that describes the phenomenon I’m talking about:

After decades where she was largely thought of as the quintessential Jewish victim of the Holocaust, “in the past 20 years Anne Frank has come to symbolize the victim of all of the world’s evils,” said David Barnouw, author of the 2012 book “The Anne Frank Phenomenon.” Barnouw is a former researcher at the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

The debate on whether Frank’s story should be viewed and taught as a particular case of the genocide against the Jews or more generally as a story of a child victim of war is as old as the diary itself…

The creeping decontextualization of the Anne Frank story is the main theme of a 2014 Dutch documentary featuring interviews with dozens of the roughly 1 million people who each year stand in line for hours to enter the Anne Frank House ”” the Amsterdam museum that was set up at her family’s former hiding place.

In the film, titled “In Line for Anne,” an activist for African-American rights from Texas, Omowale Luthuli-Allen, compares Anne’s experience to that of blacks living under segregation.

“We’ve lived like that,” he says. “In a way we have lived Anne Frank’s life.”

Augustine Sosa, a gay man from Paraguay, says his “life is very similar to that of Anne Frank.”

The article goes on to describe similar reactions from other people, in which equivalences are made that are false equivalences, although by well-meaning people. But then there’s this sort of thing:

A more controversial case is the reproduction in Amsterdam of images of Anne Frank wearing a kaffiyeh, the checkered shawl favored by pro-Palestinian activists. Postcards and T-shirts bearing the image, which was first circulated on social networks and adopted by activists seeking a boycott on Israel, were sold for years despite protests by Dutch Jews who said it suggested an equivalence between Israel and Nazi Germany.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam also objected to the image because it is “deeply hurtful, even in 2016,” the institution’s director, Ronald Leopold, told JTA last year at a symposium about the iconization of Anne Frank. The conference, featuring prominent scholars, was an attempt to understand what Anne Frank will mean to future generations.

In 2006, the Arab European League, a radical Belgium-based Muslim rights group, posted on its website a caricature of Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler. A Dutch appeals court in 2010 fined the organization for hate speech and ordered the offensive caricature removed, but it had spread on social media, where it circulates today.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. Decades ago, the Orwellian anti-Israel anti-Semitic Palestinian propaganda machine discovered the enormous advantages of comparing Israel to the Nazis and the Palestinians to the Jews during World War II, despite the fact that (among other things) the Palestinian Grand Mufti was an ally of Hitler:

In 1937, evading an arrest warrant, he fled Palestine and took refuge successively in the French Mandate of Lebanon and the Kingdom of Iraq, until he established himself in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. During World War II he collaborated with both Italy and Germany by making propagandistic radio broadcasts and by helping the Nazis recruit Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen-SS (on the ground that they shared four principles: family, order, the leader and faith). Also, as he told the recruits, Germany had not colonized any Arab country while Russia and England had.[15] On meeting Adolf Hitler he requested backing for Arab independence and support in opposing the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home. At the war’s end he came under French protection, and then sought refuge in Cairo to avoid prosecution for war crimes.

In the lead-up to the 1948 Palestine war, Husseini opposed both the 1947 UN Partition Plan and King Abdullah’s designs to annex the Arab part of British Mandatory Palestine to Jordan…

These days, though, when Israel isn’t being compared to apartheid-era South Africa, it’s being compared to Nazi Germany.

Has this sort of thing percolated down to the public in this country? You bet it has. Maybe not the full “Israel is the Nazi, and the Arab world are the Jews during WWII” except on the far left. But a slightly-weakened version seems to be mainstream among many liberals.

I base that on my recent observation of a group of several hundred people who were part of a discussion in which the topic of Anne Frank and her diary came up. Several speakers indicated that the diary was now “more topical than ever,” and each one explicitly mentioned that it was because of “what was happening to the Arabs and Muslims” at the hands of Trump and anyone who had any problem with letting unlimited numbers into this country or Europe.

That seemed to be the consensus opinion in the audience, as far as I could tell. And it’s the sort of thing I’ve heard over and over again. The fact that Muslims have many Muslim countries the world over to which they can emigrate, and have no particularly pressing need to come here, is ignored. The fact that there is no aggressive power (such as Nazi Germany in WWII) that is hunting down Muslims and aiming to kill them is ignored. The fact that Muslims live peacefully in Israel is ignored. The fact that it is the Muslim world that is driving some of the most vicious anti-Semitism today is ignored.

Update on the blog glitch

The New Neo Posted on by

In trying to deal with their trickster blog glitch that’s been switching identifies on commenters, I’ve been burning the midnight oil and talking on the phone with several people. Most of them are techies at my host, but one of them is the person who helped me set up the blog and who has fine-tuned it over the years.

No one seems to have a clue why my blog has decided to turn into a joker, or how to fix it, although several things have been tried. The consensus is that it’s not a purposeful hack and that it’s some code problem that may have been triggered by an update to a new WordPress version. The next step is to hire one of these troubleshooters who specialize in this sort of thing.

The good news is that they swear they can fix just about anything, and do it fast. The bad news is that “fast” still may take a day or two.

In the meantime, please check the comment autofill to see that it’s not filling in someone else’s information. And when you fill in your own information, if you have an email address that you don’t want to show up on another commenter’s computer, don’t use it in your comments here. You can use a fake email address, if you wish. Some of you may also notice time lags in displaying comments or in displaying posts.

In addition, if the blog goes down for a while and you want information, you can always go to my old blog site. Note the address of that blog.

I hope that this will be fixed very soon. I apologize for the annoyance. This sort of thing happens now and then to every blog, but that doesn’t make it fun.

Blog glitch

The New Neo Posted on by

Some people are experiencing a glitch in the autofill for the comments, a very odd one: the autofill is filling in other commenters’ information.

If you want to keep your email addresses secret until this glitch clears up, just put in a fake email for the duration. You will still be able to comment.

I have no idea why this is happening, but I will look into it. It seems to be somewhat related to a glitch of several months ago, where comments weren’t showing. That happened to me once today as well, and my newer posts haven’t show up right away either.

My apologies for the inconvenience. I will be working on fixing it ASAP. It’s very frustrating to me, too. If the blog goes down for any amount of time, go to my old site for further information and postings. Note that URL down if you don’t already have it: http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com .

How can a person defend against sexual harassment charges?

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments to the Bill O’Reilly post there was a discussion of whether sexual harassment lawsuits are often settled for big bucks even though the accused might be innocent. After all, why not fight the charges? Settling isn’t legally an admission of guilt, but it can be taken for such an admission, so why do it?

I mentioned that it’s sometimes easier, cheaper, and less damaging to the reputation to settle than to fight. In a court battle, the charges are fully aired and can gain even greater publicity, and legal defenses are both expensive and time-consuming. But another issue that I didn’t mention in the O’Reilly discussion was the difficulty of mounting a defense in a “he-said/she said” dispute.

It’s only in rare cases that either party has a recording of the event. It’s only rarely that there’s any record of the interactions in question, or witnesses to them. Also, what we sometimes see is a situation in which other women (it’s usually women accusing a man) come out of the woodwork to make similar accusations and mount similar lawsuits (or join in a group action). Are the later women telling the truth, emboldened by knowing there are others? Or are they simply jumping on the money-wagon? We don’t know, and we usually never know. In the court of public opinion, it often comes down to whether you tend to believe these stories or not, in general.

But what about the court of law? Sexual harassment is a civil rather than a criminal act, which means that the standard of proof is not reasonable doubt but a preponderance of the evidence. Take a look at the basic law about what constitutes sexual harassment, and you’ll see how broadly it is defined:

Sexual harassment at work is defined as:

unwelcome conduct
of a sexual nature or directed toward the victim’s gender
that creates a hostile or offensive work environment and/or
includes an adverse job action against the victim.

It’s that last bit that seems to afford some protection for the accused against frivolous or fabricated suits. If there’s no adverse action, then the plaintiff can’t win, right? Problem is that an incident of harassment can be fabricated out of revenge, ex post facto, by someone who has experienced an adverse job action that occurs for other reasons. For example, a person fails to be promoted, and the company or the boss says it’s for reason A, but the person says it’s because the boss had made advances that the person had refused. Who’s to know which it is?

Here’s a jaw-dropper:

Consent is not necessarily a defense to sexual harassment, as it may be for sexual assault. Given the power dynamics that often operate between victim and harasser, a victim may not resist or may even consent to sexual conduct out of fear of job loss or other repercussions if he or she objects. In recognition of this reality, sexual harassment may occur even if a victim consents.

I’m not trying to say that most harassment charges are fabricated. I’m assuming that many are very real, although I have no idea what percentage of the whole they represent. But there’s no question that these laws create a huge opening for fabrications, and that once such charges are made they could be difficult even for the innocent to defend against.

France: and then there were two

The New Neo Posted on by

The election in France now comes down to a contest between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. Neither is from France’s political establishment, which is exactly in line with election results in this country, reflecting trends described in Saturday’s post. If you read that post, you might say that it’s fairly clear that Macron is the candidate of the globalists, and Le Pen candidate of the anti-globalists.

And Le Pen is the candidate I predict that the majority of French voters will end up uniting against in the May 7 runoff. Already the other candidates are lining up to support Macron, pleading with urgency and desperation for the voters to stop Le Pen and elect Macron. But you know what? I wouldn’t bet a lot of money on anything in this race, including Le Pen’s defeat.

Left and right in France aren’t much like they are in this country. There’s a general rule that the entire French system is skewed to the left compared to that of the US, but within that system it’s convoluted and I don’t pretend to be an expert. However, Le Pen and her National Front are the anti-immigration, anti-free-trade, anti-EU group (much like Trump in those respects), and Macron takes the opposite stance on those matters. Until recently Macron was a member of the Socialist Party, but he left in 2015 and later started his own supposedly-centrist party, En Marche. But when I read Macron’s Wiki entry, I see a great many statements that remind me of the left in the US.

Macron is also very young: 39 (in that he resembles the Canadian Justin Trudeau, although Trudeau is six years older). Like Donald Trump, Macron never before held elective office. But Le Pen’s not exactly geriatric, either: she’s 48.

Who is Le Pen? I mean, really? The NY Times gives its point of view right off the bat:

Not since World War II has the anti-immigrant far right been closer to gaining power in France. With her second-place finish on Sunday in the first round of the presidential election, Marine Le Pen has dragged her National Front party from the dark fringes of its first 40 years.

Ms. Le Pen has oriented her appeal around what analysts and politicians call the “un-demonization” of her party ”” the shedding of its racist, anti-Semitic, Nazi-nostalgic roots. That strategy has scored big results. Until the last week of the campaign, when she turned even more sharply anti-immigrant, her speeches were shaped around what she depicted as regaining France’s “sovereignty,” breaking with the European Union and “restoring” France’s frontiers.

But an undercurrent of prejudice still undergirds the National Front’s fervent rallies. Anti-Muslim code still permeates her speeches. And a majority of French people, in polls, still say the party represents a threat to the country’s democracy.

Note the scare quotes around the words “sovereignty” and “restoring.” Are they there because they are quotes, or are they there because (wink wink) they’re “code” for something else? And is this “un-demonization” just a sham, as the article hints, and is the party still supposedly anti-Semitic and “Nazi-nostaligic”? Speaking of code, “anti-Muslim code still permeates her speeches” is an interesting way to put it. I’d love it if they’d offer some quotes so we could see what this “code” consists of, because it could be almost anything (from innocuous to mild to offensive) these days.

[NOTE: Both French candidates have rather unusual marital histories (although in France, we’ve grown used to unusual marital histories). First, Macron:

Macron is married to Brigitte Trogneux, who is 24 years older than him and was his teacher in La Providence high school in Amiens. They first met when he was a 15-year-old student in her class, but were only officially a couple once he was 18.

A bit like Newt Gingrich’s first marriage, by the way, only far more extreme (Newt married his high school geometry teacher when he was 19 and she was 26).

As for Le Pen, she’s been married and divorced twice, and now has a relationship (but not a marriage) with Louis Aliot, “who is of ethnic French Pied-Noir and Algerian Jewish heritage.”]

Gap-toothed models

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a vogue for gap-toothed models.

But that photo at the end of the article is incorrect. Madonna was not the original. Lauren Hutton was:

What’s up with this gap-toothed business? Part of it may be British; they are notorious (used to be, anyway) for having bad teeth. Part of it is the pursuit of novelty. Part of it—for Georgia Jagger—is her father’s fame and cashing in on it and her resemblance to him (and to her mom, model Jerry Hall). Even though Mick Jagger doesn’t have a tooth gap, if Georgia made her teeth look more conventional, I don’t think she’d conjure up a younger, feminine, blonder Jagger quite as well:

Freckles is another model trend. My theory about the whole thing—both the gap and the freckles—is that it’s all about looking Lolita-esque.

Models are a funny breed. Who cares what they do, anyway? And yet the top models make a ton of money, and they are ubiquitous. We see them everywhere. What’s more, their looks both reflect trends that are going on now, and determine trends of the near future.

I don’t just mean fashion trends, either, I mean trends that affect our financial lives, our love lives, the way we feel about ourselves, the way we couple up, the way we eat, and more—particularly for the young. Apparently the young don’t want to grow up. I also think it’s remarkable that this tooth gap is in the ascendance at the same time that intolerances of physical imperfections—even in regular people—has reached a fever pitch among the young, and cosmetic surgery has become ever more common to fix the smallest flaws, or things that are perceived as flaws and are really not.

Obama: follow the leader

The New Neo Posted on by

An ex-aide to Obama has made this claim:

“I think Barack Obama is probably still the leader of the Democratic Party,” Alyssa Mastromonaco, who served as Obama’s deputy chief of staff for operations, said during a CNN interview.

That’s somewhat odd, although I think it’s true. More typically, the former president returns with relief to private life and keeps a low profile, while his place is taken over by new leaders—most likely the previous candidates or his former vice-president (sometimes that’s the same person), or the head of the party in one or other branch of Congress. They either run again next time or they become sort of place-holder leaders until the new one comes along and reveals him/herself.

But those people are not taking the lead right now:

Mastromonaco was asked about other figures on the left, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), declining to call them the Democratic Party’s leader.

“Bernie … I think if you ask Bernie he would say no,” she said.

“He even said he wasn’t a Democrat the other day,” she said, pointing to the Independent Vermont senator’s comments this week.

Bernie never was a Democrat. He’s still a bit too far to the left (and definitely too old), although the party has moved closer and closer to him in policy, and he joined up (unofficially) for appearance’s sake and to run for major office.

And Hillary Clinton? Done, far more done than Richard Nixon was when you didn’t have him to kick around anymore. And I believe Hillary knows it.

The former Obama aide added that she thought Perez would play a role in helping resolve the “Democrats’ identity crisis.”

It is partly an identity crisis—how far to the left will the Democratic Party go in order to appeal to voters it thinks it needs to get elected? And it’s partly a crisis caused by a streak of post-Obama losing, as well as Congressional and state losses while he was president. What’s more, it’s a somewhat similar crisis to the one that ended up propelling the more moderate, savvy, and young Democrat Bill Clinton (you remember him; Hillary’s spouse) to the top of a retooled Democratic Party some twenty-five years ago.

Obama reversed that moderation during the eight years he was president. He initially ran as a more moderate Democrat (although nowhere near as moderate as Bill had been) in rhetoric and policy. Then, in a slow but sure process, by the time he was in his second term and particularly the last half of his second term, when he was freed from all need to be re-elected, he wasn’t moderate in the least.

Obama made the Democratic Party what it is today. He was their leader, and he was successful in that he got elected twice and muscled through a lot of policies that moved the country to the left. But he did it in part on the power of his personality and on people’s desire to usher in a groundbreaking presidency in the racial sense. The Democrats were happy to follow him leftward, but they may have forgotten that when the king is gone there have to be successors. It’s not clear whether Obama has any, or if so, who they will be.

An overarching theory of what’s going on in France (and elsewhere)

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting article in City Journal.

I use that word “interesting” a lot. That’s because an awful lot of things are interesting. But some are more interesting than others, and this is one of them. It pulls together a great deal of information and tries to make sense of it, finding a widespread pattern that may account for similarities in the populist movements springing up around the Western world. That pattern is an economic one that has resulted from globalization and stratification.

The article focuses on the work of a French geographer names Christophe Guilluy:

He has spent decades as a housing consultant in various rapidly changing neighborhoods north of Paris, studying gentrification, among other things. And he has crafted a convincing narrative tying together France’s various social problems””immigration tensions, inequality, deindustrialization, economic decline, ethnic conflict, and the rise of populist parties…

At the heart of Guilluy’s inquiry is globalization…

A process that Guilluy calls métropolisation has cut French society in two. In 16 dynamic urban areas (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes, Rouen, Toulon, Douai-Lens, and Montpellier), the world’s resources have proved a profitable complement to those found in France…But globalization has had no such galvanizing effect on the rest of France. Cities that were lively for hundreds of years””Tarbes, Agen, Albi, Béziers””are now, to use Guilluy’s word, “desertified,” haunted by the empty storefronts and blighted downtowns that Rust Belt Americans know well.

…Journalists and politicians assume that the stratification of France’s flourishing metropoles results from a glitch in the workings of globalization. Somehow, the rich parts of France have failed to impart their magical formula to the poor ones. Fixing the problem, at least for certain politicians and policy experts, involves coming up with a clever shortcut: perhaps, say, if Romorantin had free wireless, its citizens would soon find themselves wealthy, too. Guilluy disagrees. For him, there’s no reason to expect that Paris (and France’s other dynamic spots) will generate a new middle class or to assume that broad-based prosperity will develop elsewhere in the country (which happens to be where the majority of the population live). If he is right, we can understand why every major Western country has seen the rise of political movements taking aim at the present system…

France’s best-performing urban nodes have arguably never been richer or better-stocked with cultural and retail amenities. But too few such places exist to carry a national economy. When France’s was a national economy, its median workers were well compensated and well protected from illness, age, and other vicissitudes. In a knowledge economy, these workers have largely been exiled from the places where the economy still functions. They have been replaced by immigrants.

And of course, that’s not just a description of France.

I could go on quoting, but it’s probably best that you read the whole thing.

Companies don’t do this sort of thing out of sheer meanness. They do it because it’s economically beneficial to them in the short run. Countries don’t seem to know what to do about the situation, either. But voters are reaching out to support leaders who at least seem to be noticing and labeling the situation as a problem, caring what happens to those who are falling by the wayside, and promising to implement solutions.

Guilluy’s work concentrates on France, and although some of it can be generally applied, some of it is particular to France. France is facing an election tomorrow (although not a final election), one in which these issues will be played out in ways we cannot predict at the moment. I certainly can’t predict it, anyway. That doesn’t stop others from trying. For example:

A French economist who correctly forecast Donald Trump’s US election win has predicted Marine Le Pen will sweep to victory in France’s presidential race.

Charles Gave said the number of voters yet to make up their minds – estimated at 40 per cent – was bad news for current frontrunner centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron, and could see the Front National leader emerge victorious.

Mr Gave believes only scandal-hit Francois Fillon, who is currently polling in third place, could see off Ms Le Pen in the second round run-off on 7 May.

Interesting times, interesting times.

Here are the rules about shutting down the government

The New Neo Posted on by

When the Republicans in Congress decide to “shut down the government” (which isn’t really completely shutting down the government) in order to defy something the Democratic president is doing, then it’s the GOP’s fault.

When the Democrats in Congress decide to “shut down the government” (which isn’t really completely shutting down the government) in order to defy something the Republican president is doing, then it’s the GOP’s fault.

No, scratch that. It’s Trump’s fault, with glee and malice aforethought.

Class dismissed.

[NOTE: If you want to read more about the situation, go here. My personal opinion is that there won’t be any shutdown this time.]

Trump, Magritte, and me

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a tongue-in-cheek photo of Donald Trump, circa 1989 (taken for Fortune magazine), doing his own Magritte thing:

Whatever happened to that handsome, slender guy?

Same thing that happens to all of us, if we live long enough.

Which reminds me—I’m been contemplating updating my “neo with apple a la Magritte” photo. After all, it’s over eleven years old.

What do you think? Should I update, or keep the illusion going?

(I’m not talking about a reveal, by the way, although sometimes I contemplate that as well.)