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Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket

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Sunset Sailors, Twilight Prelude, Kin, Songs of Solitude by Rick Beaver (Ojibwe)

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So sorry to become someone who steals tweets but this is so funny

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Lise Davidsen and Amanda Forsythe in rehearsal for Tobias Kratzer's production of Fidelio. Royal Opera House, 2020. (Photo: Lara Cappelli)

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CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994) dir. Wong Kar-wai

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I started this blog a little over 2 years ago and many of you out there welcomed me with open arms. I never had that much luck in real life. I don't talk much about personal stuff here but since that time, I've been going through a rocky journey of self-discovery while living at university. Some ups and lots of downs.

Last month, I finally figured out that I am autistic and have adhd. I couldn't believe that I wasn't "normal" for the longest time, but many things make sense now and it's a lot to take in. At least I have my sibling to talk to for these topics, we both know it's genetics.

Anyways life is a struggle but I am constantly learning something new. That's what it's all about huh. Wishing you well wherever you are.

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god cosi fan tutte is so good I need to put fra gli amplessi in my mouth and chew it

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götterdämmerung’s act ii wedding is objectively hilarious.

behold the reasons.

gutrune tells hagen "rufe minnig die mannen". 'minnig' is v hard to translate, but it can be taken to mean 'lovely'. what does hagen do? he BELLOWS "hoiho! NOT IST DA!" (hoiho! EMERGENCY!). either hagen is exceptionally dramatic or gutrune knew this is hagen's method of calling gibich's men, and she's funnier than we think. i'd vouch for both.

the gibichsmannen (i do not know how to explain the hilarity of the german word 'mannen' in english. it's just funny ok. i personally refer to very much as my own 'mannen') automatically presume gunther has kidnapped someone and his new wife's angry family is in pursuit. that says a lot about marriage conventions.

we get to see a little about how mortals worship gods: by animal sacrifice. unfortunately, we have seen what those gods are up to for three operas. donner? useless. froh? useless no. 2. fricka? sure. she'd LOVE what's going on here. kidnapping women to marry them does seem to be the norm, but brünnhilde is already married. fricka would not like that. the man brünnhilde is married to is - her nephew. fricka is getting a migraine up in walhall as the scene goes on. and WOTAN? yeah SURE the god of "law and contracts" is going to help. since he is profoundly gifted at not getting roped up in bad contracts himself.

(on that note: gunther's "wotan! wende dich her!" (wotan! look upon us!)? gunther, my guy, wotan is not going to do fck-all, as we know from waltraute's scene. the gods have abandoned you, my friend.)

siegfried's "gunther, deinem weib ist übel" (gunther, your wife is ill) is OBJECTIVELY one of the funniest because most unfitting and situationally awkward lines ever. no, siegfried, YOUR wife is ill.

absolutely love how both siegfried and gunther are too stupid to lie that "yeah, i just gave the other guy the ring! that's why it's on his hand now!"

"nun hört genau, was die frau euch klagt" (now listen well to the woman's accusation). i feel like at this point, everyone and their mother (read: gunther and gutrune) should have realised that something about hagen's plan is REALLY off. this entire marriage scheme was almost exclusively his idea. why is he the only one not panicking? why is he instead encouraging everyone to listen to brünnhilde's accusation? especially if he is, as gunther complimented him in the first scene, the smartest among the three half-siblings? heh?

"lasst das weibergekeif!" (quit the women’s nagging!) SEXISM, siegfried.

"sühn er [siegfried] die schmach, die er mir schuf!" (let him [siegfried] atone for the dishonour he caused me!) listen, i'm all for bashing siegfried, but siegfried didn't bring any dishonour on you, gunther. siegfried currently has no memory of this wife and that, actually, is not necessarily his fault - it's yours (and hagen's).

"uns allen frommt sein [siegfried's] tod" (siegfried's death serves all of us). what do you mean, everyone - hagen, my dear? what is siegfried's death's purpose to you? everyone wonderfully overhears this.

no humour in this but i think it’s absolutely a+ that the thing that ultimately brings down siegfried, greatest of heroes and so on, is a raging woman’s wise counsel. the moment siegfried was truly doomed to death was when brünnhilde told hagen where to wound siegfried.

i feel like hagen's only mistake in this whole scene is revealing the ring's power to gunther. he’s in a great position. brünnhilde has relatively little reason to mistrust him. but, my guy, of course your incompetent brother would want the ring too. hagen could've just emphasised how necessary siegfried's death is to restore gunther's hOnOuR or what, left the ring out of it, and seized it afterwards without much ado.

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Moonlight

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was looking for a decent english libretto of carmen online and stumbled upon a website that had evidently just put the whole thing through google translate and called it a day. i present for your viewing pleasure some highlights:

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Cloud study, John Constable.

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Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence // Ada Limón, "Lies About Sea Creatures" // Sherita Walker // @itsbaditsgood // Richard Siken, "I Had a Dream About You" // Richard Siken, "You Are Jeff" (8) // Richard Siken, "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out" // @_demarmol on Instagram // Anne Sexton, "The Touch"

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“Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.”

— Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.

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This a a reminder to not fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy. Just because you invested time and energy into something, does not mean you should indefinitely waste more time and energy on it, if you decide it’s not what you want anymore. This goes for anything, from books, to relationships, to jobs, to hobbies, etc.

If it’s not serving you anymore, move on.

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i need the met’s social media department to do this for every opera please and thank you

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forever thinking about johanna shooting fogg and what it says for both her and anthony as characters

because the whole show, from the very first scene, we've been set up to see anthony and sweeney as parallels of one another; anthony is sweeney back when he was benjamin, he's full of hope, he's in love (with a woman who looks almost identical to lucy), and then he gets that love brutally ripped away by judge turpin

in 'no place like london' sweeney says: "you are young, life has been kind to you-- you will learn" and by the point in the show where anthony is going to rescue johanna we're almost inclined to agree with him

except anthony cannot shoot the gun, he's not like sweeney in that he cannot kill another person even if it was to save someone he loved. anthony is never going to become sweeney todd.

and then we realize that we've been looking at the wrong person the whole show, and it's so obvious it's laughable: johanna shoots the gun.

johanna who has been raised to be silent and obedient and perfect, johanna who, without knowing the half of it, has had everything taken away from her by judge turpin, her mother, her father, and her freedom. johanna who we've been led to believe is the lucy to anthony's sweeney.

she is fully justified in shooting fogg, no one could fault her for it, but she doesn't even hesitate.

in that moment she is her father's daughter.

that isn't to say that I think johanna is going to go on a killing spree after the musical, obviously, but it's such a fascinating scene in terms of their development: because despite it all anthony is still the same, and because of it all johanna is not

anthony is the last bit of hope left in the story, and johanna is the last bit of sweeney

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PLEASE THIS IS SO OUT OF POCKET

(also happy leap day!)