RedStateEclectic

Richard Wagner’s 200th anniversary

Mark Twain, who thought that "Wagner's music is better than it sounds," humbly proposed to improve the master's operas by performing them in the manner of pantomime plays.

Mark Twain on Parsifal:

The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a Wagner opera done in pantomime once. Then one would have the lovely orchestration unvexed to listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the bewildering beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the [silent] acting couldn’t mar these pleasures, because there isn’t often anything in the Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting; as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent people, one of them standing still, the other catching flies. Of course I do not really mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that the usual operatic gestures which consist in reaching first one hand out into the air and then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if the operator attended strictly to business and uttered no sound.

Woody Allen: “Every time I listen to Wagner, I get the urge to invade Poland.”

The controversial composer's music has never found its way to my heart.

I am not sure the below arrangements are likely to change my attitude much.

21 hours of Wagner music in a little over 4 minutes, this is what the below performance offers all those who have not been able to get tickets for the famous Bayreuth festival dedicated to Wagner.

 

Also interesting:

 

A Nice "Woman With Dog" Story From Oklahoma

 

 

I like this woman.  She's less traumatized by the tragedy than the reporter is.

And speaking of the reporter - why did this woman have to ask for help?  Afraid of breaking a nail?

 

 

Related articles

But They Got The Suspect. Thats Not the Point!!! (Guest Post)

Deadly tornadoes ravage Oklahoma

VIDEO: Oklahoma ravaged by tornadoes

Light in the Wake of Darkness in Oklahoma....

A Ship with the Engine Off

Notes Steven Kates, author of the best introduction to economics there is:

If even Chris Matthews is done with Obama, who’s left? You can even watch the video here but this is the text:

‘What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians — that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press…. He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft,’ Matthews said.

‘So what part does he like? He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere,’ Matthews continued. ‘But what part does he like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn’t like selling to the press. He doesn’t like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.’

On Tuesday’s program, Matthews similarly called Obama ‘a ship with the engine off.’

“A ship with the engine off.” He’s actually much worse than that and far more destructive but it will do for now.

The source.

Compare this with what Richard Epstein has to say (in the first 2 minutes of the below video) about his former colleague.

 

Oops! Never Mind!

Here we go again.  I seem to recall that when the affair was breaking, Sanford dug the hole deeper every time he opened his mouth. Looks like his handlers haven't caught on to that yet.  Again from The Daily Caller:

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford says he visited his wife’s home while she was out of town because he didn’t want his 14-year-old son to watch the Super Bowl alone.

Sanford, who is running for a vacant congressional seat and trying to mount a political comeback, issued a news release Wednesday explaining why he was at his wife’s home in February.

Jenny Sanford has filed court documents saying her ex-husband violated their divorce settlement by visiting her Sullivans Island home Feb. 3, using his cellphone as a flashlight. He has been ordered to appear at a court hearing in May, two days after the election.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/17/mark-sanfords-ex-wife-says-he-trespassed/#ixzz2QjqRZROh

 The 2012 Super Bowl was on Feb 5th.  That part's true.  But the 2013 Super Bowl was on Feb 3rd. Drat the luck.

But still, why did the press wait until after the primary to break this story?

Prayers For Boston, But The Government Is Still Useless

The events in Boston are tragic.  The aftermath is horrific.  Really, it's enough to put me off the internet for a while.  The Democrats hope the Republicans did it, the Republicans hope the Muslims did it, and the Muslims hope the Muslims didn't do it.

I can't understand why anybody would do it.

Homeland Security showed up a few hours after the explosions, bringing lots of shiny new toys and putting on parade, complete with an airshow. A good spontaneous display of the state's power, but entirely useless.

Speaking of useless  - 

One of the human interest stories coming out of the mayhem is about a 78 year old runner who was knocked down by the force of the blast. He got up and finished the race, but here's the thing: see all those cops right there?  Do you think any of them helped the man up?

You already know what I'm going to say, don't you?

No, a race official came to help. Boston's finest ran away. (Note you can see the second blast in the second photo.) Sure, it was a moment of confusion. Nobody was sure what had just happened. But not one of those three "heroes" had the basic instinct to reach down and help the man up. That troubles me as much as the bombers - maybe more. I mean, I already know the bomber is evil and crazy.

I suppose I should be glad they didn't arrest the guy for obstruction.

 

 

Jonathon Winters Dead at 87

Rest in peace, and thanks for the laughs, funny man:

 

Comedy was better when it was more innocent. 

RIP Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher:

On productiveness and the charitable instinct:“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.” On the hostile press: “If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn’t swim.”

Read more at the source.

On Europe:

Thatcher’s basic take on a tight European federation was that it was unnecessary, unworkable, and dangerous. The nation state, she insisted, should remain at the heart of the international system, and a federated Europe would threaten its sway.

Moreover, Thatcher had misgivings about the Continent as a source of moral inspiration. “During my lifetime,” she reminisced, “most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one form or another, from mainland Europe, and the solutions — from outside it.”

That insight alone is priceless, but it still pales compared with what she wrote more than a decade ago, when the euro was still a toddler, and the economies of Greece, Spain and Cyprus seemed as distant from calamity as they now are from salvation. “The European single currency,” wrote Thatcher in 2002, “is bound to fail — economically, politically, and indeed socially.”

Thatcher’s reasoning for this was not ideological. It was monetarist. There can be no such thing as a united currency without a united budget, she argued, at a time when it was impolite to suggest that the euro’s newlyweds would soon accuse each other of theft, deceit, laziness, imperialism and oppression.

The source.

 

Cyprus

Following up on Angela's Meanwhile, Over In Cyprus, listen to what Nigel Farange has to say:

 

Greenpeace Urging Obama To Ban Cats

Image credit.

No, no, not quite.

However, following up on Who Is Going to Kill Those Cats, I ask our readers to note:

The review estimates that if Keystone is not built, oil sands production will be only 0.4 to 0.6 percent less that if the pipeline is built, or less than 0.83 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions annually. This difference equates to less than two hours of U.S. emissions, a negligible amount. Seventy-four million US housecats annually cause an estimated 196 times this emissions volume. Why isn’t Greenpeace urging President Obama to ban cats?

The full article.

See also The Cat in Me.

Letter to Charles Darwin

The older I get, the more I cherish the experience of getting closer to the truth by being wrong at a considerable rate.

The amazing thing about this story, Charles, is that not a jot of it was known even when I was a boy, let alone you. There is something almost miraculously exciting about the way we can recover and relive the past adventures of the planet in glorious detail thanks to modern science.

You once wrote, in a letter to your sister from the Falkland Islands in 1834, of the pleasure of "finding a fine group of fossil bones, which tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue." Today, almost 180 years later, the fossils, isotopes and spores not only speak softly of slow and gradual changes but cry out the story of a violent and truly terrible catastrophe that once transformed life on Earth.

Read the articles here and here.