Notebook travels and leather-clad dancing boys

The Wandering Moleskine Project weblog. What an absolutely brilliant idea. I may sign myself up to contribute. Via Space and Culture, which in turn is via Caterina.

Also, vilaine fille has rapidly become one of my favorite new blogs. Look at what she has to say on the subject of why opera isn’t just for stodgy diamond-encrusted people:

[I]sn’t it astonishing that opera is so powerfully associated with social preening, dramatic blankness, and blue-haired irrelevance that it scares people away? Opera is big and bad and dangerous. It tells pulse-quickening tales of incest (Die Walküre), whoring (La traviata), and wanton libido (Don Giovanni, Le Comte Ory); of insanity (Orlando, Lucia), adultery (Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, L’incoronazione di Poppea), and sedition (Ernani, Don Carlos); of the deformed (Rigoletto), the despised (La Juive), and the marginalized (Carmen, Otello). It depicts orgies (Samson et Dalila, Moses und Aron, The Fiery Angel); and when we’re very, very lucky, it features dancing boys in leather butt-thongs (NYCO’s Platée and the Met’s 1973 staging of Les Troyens).

Word! As they say, read the whole thing.

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