Look at it this way. For every new male-male couple, there are two more women left without husbands. So the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage actually increases the chances that frustrated straight young men can find women who’ll sleep with them.
See? The Family Research Council should be thanking us for preventing even more tragedies like this one.
Dave and I visited the Contemporary Jewish Museum last week, mainly to see the Arthur Szyk exhibit. Dave knew Szyk’s work as a political and satirical artist, but this is something different, an exhibit of the original artwork for Szyk’s illustrated Haggadah, which he drew mostly in the 1930s.
Both Dave and I made the mistake of starting to our left and heading clockwise around the gallery. I was over a third of the way around, and Dave was ahead of me, by the time I realized we were looking at the illustrations in the wrong order. Whoops.
The illustrations are stunning, rich and detailed, with lots of touches of grandeur, pathos, whimsy, and political commentary, sometimes all in the same illustration. You can find many of the illustrations online (for example, at szyk.com), but the electronic versions don’t come close to capturing the richness of the colors and the fine details in the pen work.
Here’s one that made me laugh. It’s an illustration of the four types of sons. Reading right to left (this is in Hebrew, remember), top to bottom, they are the wise son, the wicked son, the simple son, and the son who doesn’t know how to ask. What made me laugh right away is that the wicked son is portrayed as fat and wealthy, a self-satisfied bürger with a mustache somewhat reminiscent of Hitler’s. (Probably intentionally — see the next paragraph.) But on a further look, it’s also pretty funny that the most attractive and interesting of the four isn’t the wise son — who looks a bit of a prig, to me at least — but the son who doesn’t know how to ask. Am I just projecting my own issues onto the painting, or was Szyk most sympathetic to the fourth son?
Dave noticed that there is a thin cut all around the rectangle containing the illustration of the wicked son. It looks as though Szyk changed his mind and decided to replace that illustration after he’d done all four, so he carefully cut out the rectangle, pasted a new piece of paper behind the hole, and drew a new character. Based on the other materials on display, there seems to be a strong possibility that Szyk’s first version of the wicked son was much more suggestive of Hitler.
The exhibit held an added bit of poignance for me, if poignance is the right word, in that I am descended from Jews who, like Szyk, fled Europe to get away from the Nazis. Yet I didn’t learn about this family history till middle age, so it doesn’t really feel like part of my personal heritage, doesn’t have much emotional resonance for me. I feel kind of sad that I don’t feel more of a personal connection, but there you go, that’s who I am, always seeming to have one foot in this realm and the other in that one, never quite belonging to any.
I did tear up, though, when I came to Szyk’s page of dedication to the Jews in Germany. A lot of my ancestors were included in that dedication, and only a handful of that side of the family ever got out. Something that I only learned about fairly late in life, and that still startles me a little to remember.
Dave and I want to refresh our dim memories of the Haggadah and then head back to see the exhibit one more time.
If anyone else has bought some Macys Basics “Tool of the Trade” pots and pans and finds that they’re good, inexpensive pots and pans except for the fact that the goddam screws that attach the handles keep falling out, I now have the answer.
We’ve been tightening and re-tightening the screws pretty regularly for over a year, but recently we finally lost two of the screws altogether. So I wanted to go to the hardware store and buy replacements for them, but this turned out to involve quite a bit more careful measurement, trial and error, and self-education about international screw sizes than I had bargained for. Which I am posting about here in case there’s someone out there with the same problem.
So here’s what my investigation has uncovered. The handles are designed so that they can accommodate much longer screws, yet the frigging manufacturer is using the shortest possible screws that will barely hold the handle on at all. It looks to me that if the screws were even a millimeter shorter, the threads on the screw would not reach the threads in the pot or pan and the handles would just not be attached. The result is that the screws don’t have to get very loose before they suddenly fall out. I’m sure the manufacturer saves all of three cents per pan or pot through this incredibly stupid and irritating cost-cutting measure. (Other than this, as I said, they are good, inexpensive pots and pans. But dropping a screw here or there every few weeks is just ridiculous.)
As far as I can tell, the screws are metric, not U.S., which makes sense because the manufacturer is in Europe. At least, I couldn’t find a standard U.S. screw size that looked like it would work. The screws that come with the pots and pans are Phillips flat head machine screws, and the size appears to be M5 × 7 mm (sometimes given as “5 mm × 7 mm”). This is too damn short.
If you have this problem, too, what you need are Phillips flat head machine screws either in size M5 × 10 mm or in size M5 × 12 mm (sometimes given as 5 mm × 10 mm or 5 mm × 12 mm). The handles can accommodate a screw up to 12 mm in length, but a 10 mm screw is long enough to hold the handles on very securely. A decent hardware store should carry them.
(Just to complicate things further, you will also occasionally see these called M5-0.8 × 10 mm screws or 5 mm × 0.8 mm × 10 mm. The “0.8 mm” figure is the pitch, and it measures how close together the threads are on the screw. 0.8 mm is the standard pitch for a 5 mm diameter screw, so it is often omitted in the designation.)
Two more good reviews for Die Fledermaus, or The Bat Bites Back, one from the Examiner and one from Repeat Performances. From the latter:
… accessible and tightly executed, largely thanks to a new translation into English by David Scott Marley, known to Berkeley Opera audiences for his Riot Grrrl on Mars and Manga Flute.
Another good review for Die Fledermaus, or The Bat Bites Back, this one on CultureVulture:
Strauss’ tale of fin de siècle decadence and (mild) debauchery among Vienna’s upper (and not-so-upper) classes comes through loud and clear and quite amusing, thanks to a splendid new translation by David Scott Marley. Having recently suffered through (via radio broadcast) the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of the same work with its long stretches of dialogue and not-so-funny jokes, I doubly appreciated Marley’s wit, economy and way with words.
After the opening weekend in Walnut Creek, the stage director and I trimmed five or six minutes of spoken dialogue, at least half of it from the first half of the first act. It was mostly a matter of cutting a line here and a couple lines there wherever it felt like we were continuing to make a point longer than was needed. The trimmed version played in Napa last weekend, and worked wonderfully; the first act zips along with more energy, and the later acts, though trimmed much less, benefit all the same from the greater momentum. It’s a really terrific show.
We play two performances this weekend at the Bankhead Theater in Livermore. The following weekend we play two performances in Mountain View, and the weekend after that four performances in San Francisco.
San Francisco Classical Voice, January 26, 2014:
Fresh and lively … Don’t dare miss it.
Benicia Herald, January 27, 2014:
The new translation features entirely modern language and nicely follows the original, sprightly tone of the tale.
This is chillingly reminiscent of the Up Stairs Lounge massacre, but with a far happier ending. On New Year’s Eve in Seattle, somebody poured gasoline on the carpeted stairs to a crowded second-floor gay nightclub and tossed a match on it. Fortunately, some quick-thinking soldiers thwarted the attempted historical reenactment.
(For those who don’t know, the Up Stairs Lounge in New Orleans was a gay bar that was the target of a terrible arson attack in the 1970s. It’s an important part of our history as LGBT folks and worth at least knowing about. The Wikipedia entry is informative and not too upsetting, but be warned before searching further than Wikipedia that the details and photographs available online are horrifying and the stuff of nightmares.)
Also fortunately, the Seattle club was sprinklered and had multiple fire exits. Yay for modern fire codes, too. And for newspapers that will report on these things and police departments that will investigate them, neither of which we had in the 1970s.
From a lengthy and rather snotty harangue on Breitbart.com a few days ago:
Let us assume [Chris] Kluwe’s recollection is correct and Vikings top brass was not happy with his advocacy. Let us even assume that is what led to his being released from the team.
So what?
What Kluwe fails to grasp, as many in today’s society often do, is that NFL teams are private organizations: as such, they can release an employee for any reason that is not contrary to the law (e.g., race) and is not contractually forbidden. Moreover, the contracts players often sign with the teams include all manner of behavioral clauses, likely including that the player’s actions on-and-off the field not reflect poorly on the team. Oh, and did I mention the players have a very strong union that protects them? Somehow, however, Kluwe wishes for the reader to believe he is a victim of homophobes and cowardly-servants-of-homophoboes who wouldn’t just let-Chris-be-Chris.
If Kluwe’s stance was bringing unwanted attention onto the Vikings, and angering or alienating some Viking fans (which his views clearly did), the team would have been well within its rights to release him, if only from a purely public-relations-nightmare angle.
So let me be sure I’ve got this straight. If you’re suspended for a couple of weeks between episodes from your television series because you’ve made antigay statements, that’s a violation of your First Amendment rights. If you’re fired permanently from your football team because you’ve made progay statements, that’s a perfectly reasonable response to the offense you gave to some of your team’s fans.
Hooookay.
(Also: Is it just me, or should somebody really lock down the hyphen on this guy’s keyboard for his own protection?)
Wednesday Dave and I celebrated our nineteenth anniversary.
When I was writing my libretto for Stories by Hoffmann, I needed to write a lyric for Hoffmann to sing to Giulietta that would express his yearning for a kind of love that could follow all the disillusions he had suffered with his first two loves. (Unfortunately, the poor guy has his worst disillusionment of all still ahead of him, because Giulietta is planning to betray him in the most devastating way possible, but he doesn’t know this yet and his words to Giulietta have to be deeply sincere.) I found the right words for Hoffmann when I thought about my own relationship with Dave. Hoffmann’s lyric ends:
A smile that knows regret,
A laughter laced with rue,
A heart both wise and true:
All these I’ve found in you.
More than anything else I’ve written, those four lines are for Dave.
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