(no subject)

torn between an increasing sense of pointlessness of keeping a journal & the nagging feeling of guilt that at this rate i'll never catch up. too many entries half-formed in my head and never enough time or energy to actually write them out. words never seem to fit recently, always akward, out of reach...


Sat:
'Don Giovanni' at Salzburg with the parents, by their invitation, obviously. didn't have the nerve to ask what the ticket actually cost. :: facepalm :: god. i'm feeling so very posh even mentioning this. about as much as i felt underdressed there.

anyway. in retrospect perhaps it was wrong wanting to see this solely upon M. Kusej directing. after all - and maybe i hadn't been sufficiently aware of this - direction is not the most important thing with an opera, or at least not as important as it can be with theatre - the music is; me being not much of an opera person i obviously lack a lot of listening experience to really appreciate the music the way it deserved to be. as far as i can tell, the singers were all very good. acted, too.

the production was sparely elegant, with Kusej's trade mark beautiful, rather static images, emphasising the emotional coldness, the brutality, the meaninglessness of the life DG leads.
about Leporello killing DG in the end - from what i gathered from various articles, the intention was to show that DG was already dead as far as his soul was concerned and Leporello was merely killing him as a kind of mercy. but seeing as this happens right before DG is being dragged to hell this still doesn't make a lot of sense to me (unless of course you're supposed to interpret 'hell' as a psychological process only, a kind of ultimate decline), though i actually did understand it that way at the moment i was seeing it. right then i thought perhaps he believed he might save DG's soul by killing him, though i don't think in reality there's much indication for that.

on the other hand, starting from something my mother said (despite the fact that her idea was derived from a misunderstanding of something she'd read) DG and Leporello might indeed be looked at as two aspects of the same person. after a series of unsuccessful tries at either making him change his behaviour or leaving him, starting from the non voglio più servir at the beginning, in the final crisis unable to save him he is forced to take a decision - kill him or be dragged to hell (or whatever mental and moral decline this is a metaphor for) along with him. i'm no longer sure it makes much sense put this way, but it did make sense in my head at one point.

that it's not Leporello, but DG who sings the first couple of lines might hint at this, and it would fit with what Kusej did with Hamlet a couple of years ago, merging several parts and having them personify the different voices in Hamlet's head.


the revolving stage with its doors and concentric structure - metaphor for the self-centered mind, the guilt (personified by his victims) waiting at the center, unseen or ignored, biding their time until he is forced to ultimately acknowledge them ?

interesting, too, that at the beginning of the 21st century 'DG' has become decidedly moral, presented in a way that isn't supposed to invite the least sympathy for the main character any longer. we see his skillfully employed charm at work in his seductions, but the brutality of his behaviour otherwise makes the sweetness all the more horrific. this is not the rebellion of the individual against social norms, but a libertà empty of meaning and lacking anything to defend itself against; no brave, if ill-advised, defiance of conformity until the end, no tragic hubris that has at least a touch of grandeur, but the necessary end to a meaningless life that revolves around an obsessive and neverending search for distraction from its emptiness. voglio divertirmi.

now this makes the opera very dark indeed, all the lives influenced, almost destroyed by and revolving about this centre of negativity...


pity that seeing it again isn't an option...






Sun:
visited Schloss Hellbrunn while i was there, very pretty. got wet at the trick fountains along with a horde of tourists, which was quite fun, especially in this heat. learned that the sunflower did come from Peru, which, in all honesty i hadn't known. never given it much thought.

my father insisted we all have lunch together, the result being i was sick on the train home and didn't feel too well all evening. :: le sigh :: family...


Tue:
actually managed to go biking for 3 hrs before work - i'm kinda proud of myself.


Wed:
drove the car over to my sister's place and returned by train - crossing the Danube offered an incredible view... the sun was just setting, the sky a very pale blue partly veiled with thin white clouds - somehow its reflection made the river look like it was made of some solid substance rather than water, a broad, light band just lying there, stretching under the bridge, absolutely unmoving. surreal.


also, Buffy finale. plot-wise, i wasn't overly impressed, but imho the show has always been better with the small touches, character building, humour and such, than the big plot arcs. however, i rather liked how it became more and more blatantly feminist towards the end - now one could or course argue that 'Buffy' is inherently feminist, but it never struck me as forcible as in the last couple of episodes when the girls stand up to the guardians of patriarchalic order - the police when they try to beat up Faith, the obsessively misogynist priest Caleb (imo one of the scariest villains in the Buffy-verse), ultimately changing the fundamental rules about there being only one slayer. it could have been horribly cliched, but somehow it wasn't...

plus, i've always had a soft spot for the Spike/Buffy , er, 'relationship' after her, er, resurrection, maybe because for (or because of) all the issues it's fraught with it's remarkably lacking in gender clichés...

sweet, in the end. ah well, enough said, it's almost 4 am & i'm drop dead tired... g* came over earlier & it was actually kind of nice, companionable. friendshipy. but now the caffeine is finally wearing off...

now i only wish some tv station would do a complete rerun, because i only started watching at some point mid-4th season...

conspiration theories & such...

ah damn. my boss being on vacation & business being rather slow due to the heat (yes, it's still hot...) i get to read a lot.. so there was A. von Bülow, 'Die CIA und der 11. September' and G. Wisnewski, 'Operation 9/11'.

:: shakes head :: i'm not quite sure what to think... those conspiration theory conspiration theories are like an alternative universe.

on the one hand i understand that there might be a psychological need to make the meaningless meaningful, the accidental less so, because apparently the human mind doesn't like to accept to what extent we're still subject to chance, major and minor accidents and failures and any likely or unlikely combination thereof.

we can't blame gods or demons any longer, we don't believe in fate, oracles or omens, so we can only point the finger at each other. we need to believe we can control our lives, or, in default, that someone we can blame for anything that goes wrong controls them. there has to be some slightly perverse satisfaction in the belief / knowledge that we're subject to powers we're helpless against, and apparently a well orchestrated conspiracy is a much more emotionally satisfying explanation than the possibility of a rather random combination of events that needed a lot of chance, luck and human failure to happen as they did.

maybe conspiration theories are our way of coping, just as people in ancient times suddenly 'remembered' all kinds of omens having happened before what later turned out to be great or catastrophic events.


on the other hand, though, some of the questions the authors (and their sources) raise, i'd been asking myself after 9/11, only at some point stopped thinking about and more or less accepted the official version. still, the way evidence suddenly turned up right after the attack seemed a little too convenient even than, and i had been asking myself why, especially given the span of time between the attacks, none of the planes had been intercepted. especially that the Pentagon should be so undefended seemed to stretch credibility at the time, but then i'm not american & thought maybe this impression was a result of me watching too many movies. now both authors claim that there's an international standard procedure for cases when a plane leaves its course and doesn't react to calls for a few minutes, which was disregarded in all four cases. true ? false?

a plane full of military and ex-military persons (the one that allegedly crashed into the Pentagon) & they couldn't overpower a couple of guys with box-cutters?

planes and bodies that were more or less vaporized in defiance of the laws of physics? again, true?, false?

why would a terorist chose to limit the damage and go out of his way in order to crash into a mostly unoccupied wing of the Pentagon? chance? all lies?

the utterly idiotic and certainly less than inconspicuous behaviour and apparent incompetence of the terrorists...


what about the 'Operation Northwoods' file Wisnewski quotes in his book, are they genuine or forgery?