Mozart's Mass for the Fucking Bored

Saw Mozart's Mass in C Minor last night from the TSO and the MacMillan choir, with Gigi and Victor Emmanuelle. And you know what, I didn't like it. The Slovakian soprano, Simona Saturova, was absolutely divine and struck deep into my heart with the first note, but she was called on by the score to do things that simply weren't nice. Other things in the score also simply weren't nice. With starts and stops and galloping things out of nowhere.

And I don't blame Mozart for that. I never blame Mozart for anything, of course. I blame Robert Levin, the editor. I'm going to listen to an edition done by someone else before I get too judegemental, but, you know, last night I wasn't impressed. Levin did give a talk before the Mass about how he went about finishing an unfinished Mozart mass. It was interesting in a boring sort of way and could have been shorter - he has an undue fondness for simile.

Also, I didn't appreciate Lauren McNeese as the mezzo at all. Maybe it was where I was sitting but her volume seemed misjudged and intrusive so I kept wishing she would shut the fuck up - not my typical feeling for mezzos.

That's alot of complaining, but I'm pretty sure I mean it, as my hormonally induced desire to blow up the universe ended around eleven yesterday morning. It was especially helped by a wonton soup from Spring Roll's express restaurant. Goddamn, those were good wontons. If I had balls and wasn't deathly allergic to their dietary staples, like peanuts, I'd move to Thailand and try learn their whole. Other. HUGE. school of cuisine. As it stands I might move to Korea.

Otherwise, last night's miniscule baritone part featured Philip Carmichael, the guy who'd just owned Don Giovanni in the student-y production I saw awhile ago. That was cool - I love a decently good looking baritone, and even a fucking pig-ugly one, I might add - but his part was so. Small. Snooze.

Blindfolded and spinning

Honestly, I have nothing worthwhile to tell you today. Getting out of bed made me want to shoot myself and I find it deeply annoying and offensive that I even have to think at the moment. So I'm drinking some nice chai and thinking about having Indian food for lunch with my baby and essentially - well - blahhhhhh.

Since I've got nothing else to say, I'd like to send you all a heads-up about a new and aggressive round of product-placement you and the people you love are about to be subject to. GM is struggling to make a comeback in its automaking division, so it's paid to star in the new Transformers movie (a bunch of new model cars are the 'in-the-closet' versions of the robot heroes).

Personally and generally speaking, I don't give a good goddamn about product placement, since it's less obtrusive than commercial interruptions or outdoor advertising and it means entertainment projects get sponsored (though I swear, no woman in the Italian immigrant community I belong to would ever drink all the goddamn Diet Coke Carmela Soprano does and it's starting to piss me off).

But this Transformers effort is directed at children, and aggressive subliminal advertising to children is just wrong. These kids might think GM cars are cool when they're old enough to buy one, and unless the world changes radically in the next ten years they won't be, they'll be penguin crap like always. So before you take a young relative to see Transformers, ask yourself if you really want to be ferried back and forth from the old folks home in 50 years by a twat driving a GM.

I heart Hannah Arendt

I've come to a conclusion about PMSing based on my present mood, and that is PMSing women (and men - oh yes, you non-bleedy types go through monthly mood swings, you can give them some big tough name if you want but I call it PMS, bitches) don't become irrational beasts, but rather suddenly find it much harder to shake off the small ways in which they are offended. Maybe this is why it annoys us so much when people ask if we're PMSing after we visibly swallow the desire to snap their heads off. Because of course, in our minds the primary concern is what the hell is wrong with you that you're giving us the shits, not why it's easier, all of a sudden, to give us the shits.

Anyways. I've lost count so I don't know if I'm PMSing or in a pisser. But yesterday, in the midst of feeling deep self-pity about working 37.5 long hours a week while having to prepare a doctoral proposal, I decided to console myself by buying some Hannah Arendt books. One was Eichmann in Jerusalem, whose subtitle is On the Banality of Evil or something - I've read it before but I figured Figaro might like it - and the other is a smaller pamphlet called On Violence, that I'd never read before but is just enchanting me as it goes on about hippies and everything else. I really like Hannah Arendt's perspectives - so robust, so slappingly snarky at times without getting petty, so informed yet optimistic, so centred on the power of the individual in a non-macho way which is so much stronger than so many philosophers. Though I guess she's not a philosopher because she said she wasn't, even though booksellers put her books in that section.

It was funny - yesterday at the used bookstore I was looking for things by her, for George Fox's diaries, for anything that got turned in by Jung and maybe the I Ching for Figaro, So I was wondering up and down this one aisle, that had the categoried "Psychology", "Religion", "Philosophy" and some other "Mysticism" or "Occult" or whatever bullshit they had the I Ching stuck under.

And it made me think about why Hannah Arendt said she wasn't a philosopher. Though I find her work focusses so satisfyingly on the power of the individual in society, she thought that her work focussed on society too much to be philosophical - that philosophy looked inward into the person and what she wrote about was a person's participatory, involved and political role . . .

So I was thinking about that and looking at all these consecutive shelves of psychology, religion, et al . . . so many of the books had an intensely personal focus, through all those sections; all the sections looked like they were selling the sorts of things people would turn to to help develop their sense of selves. Like me. I've turned to such things for just such a purpose - preparation for new career training it may possibly be but so far this year I've spent hundreds of dollars on Jung. What I've found with analysis is that through the development of my sense of self, I understand better how other people relate to me and how to take care of them or get along with them - be a better social and political animal, in short - what a thing to have to learn! You'd think we'd just know that and that all of our childhood education would be leading up to that. And yet, there's more than one industry founded on the back of us being mongoloids in the realms of social and political understanding. Weird.

Here comes that fruity feeling

Well, thank sweet strawberry jissom for small mercies. My job may make me want to burn things, my future may look like a foggy labyrinth and some of my friends are in the midst of physical or emotional breakdowns, but at least it's persimmon season again. Or at least the season to start importing persimmon.

Makes me want to move to a place with fresh tropical-type fruit all year around – I love fruit, but don't do well with the sort of fruit that can be grown in cool temperate climates like here or Northern Europe – apples, pears, peaches, and plums make me pukey if they're not cooked. Sort of. Some persimmons do and some persimmons don't, too. The long ones make me pukey, as do some of the short ones, but then the others I can eat until there aren't any more in reach. Plums are weird too. An ex had some on his organic farm in Switzerland; the dark ones I ate like a dirty pig, the yellow ones made me puke, and generally speaking they always make me puke so maybe it was just that one tree of his.

Things get better in Southern Italy. I can eat almost all the fruit there besides the figs and cherries – the citrus, the prickly pear, the pomegranate, the weird orange squishy things that were like persimmon except they exploded wetly when you touched them, making them the sort of food you need to eat with your face. And yes, it's as much like oral sex as it sounds – except the person eating is the one who feels all the pleasure. No fucking clue what they're called but they're on heaven's menu. Maybe they were persimmons too, but ripe, and therefore nothing like the ones we get here.  

And then once you get to actual tropical imports, it's all good. No problems there at all. So somehow, a Cawasprian bitch living in Canada has ended up with a tropical tummy. One of God's own jokes, and a rather naughty one to play on an exemplar of his creatures who best likes stuffing her face. I think I need to move somewhere balmy.

Whiny lazy hoo-er

Connubial bliss is making me lazy, if this past extremely pleasant weekend is any indication. I can't really blame brokeness; that has nothing to do with the gym suddenly being anathema and me hardly being able to remember the proposed subject of a doctoral thesis. I'm going to be 28 in a little more than a month - keep expecting myself to grow some sort of work ethic and it keeps not happening.

Part of the problem is the Sopranos - we must have watched 10 episodes over the last two days. Thank god they only have until season four at the video store; ten more episodes and our lives will be our own again. And about time. Figaro pointed out that Ralphie doing poppers and getting done with a vibrator was digging a bit for audience share and on reflection I agree. I can imagine the Ralphie we've been getting to know is a big pervert, but not one who likes to get told he's mummy's little whore. And I should know.

The dress code at work has been adjusted. Our director wants us, from Tuesday to Thursday, to dress well enough that we could show up at an impromptu funeral if we had to, which is a big tighten. Monday goes casual, as well as Friday. To that I say, Jesus. My whole department could do their jobs from home anyways, and we do zero personal reception, and now you want me to wear uncomfortable shoes three days a week without paying me more? Up until recently I've been pretty happy at work, considering I think my company's mandate is evil. But the waves of Whine are rising up in me like tsunamis. Saints preserve the people who are forced to listen to them.