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Friday, July 30, 2004

THIS/THAT, continued

Makes a great coffee table book off which to snort lines: the Arch-drude has been garnering some attention over his monolithic book on megaliths in the anthropological world.

I wish I had a Globe & Mail column so I could write crap too: Russell Smith surely must have better ideas to work with, but instead opts to write about fictional characters' knowledge of plants in literature. Then again, if it's not about urban angst, he's pretty much out of his element. By the way, his latest effort, Muriella Pent, makes a great coffee table book off which to snort lines.

How empathetic, with emphasis on the pathetic: the TNR article outlining the capture of High Value Targets by Pakistan before the fall election has been updated in the wake of the capture of a Tanzanian Al Qaeda operative. Quite remarkable that it co-incided with John Kerry's day of nomination. Fat lot of good it did though, as the Democrats are ahead in the polls. Guess that means Bush will have to kick it up a notch with his heartwarming Compassion Across America campaign.

And Wagner wept: artistic license is one thing, but re-interpreting Wagnerian vision is quite another. People pay years in advance to see and hear something very specific in Bayreuth, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't include projected images of Osama Bin Laden inside the Festspielhaus. On an ironic note, fledgling director Christoph Schlingensief is dissatisfied with the lack of video technology capability inside the theater, a position which leaves me dumbfounded. Guess Wagner poured all of his money into sound and forgot all about the video end of things. And the whole racism allegation against tenor Endrik Wottrich seems like a ploy to gain more acceptance for the re-worked version of Parsifal. Is it really so surprising that comments pertaining to race were made considering that the original story unfolds in Europe, and not in Africa? And let's not forget that Wottrich might just be upholding Wagnerian tradition by voicing such opinions. Alas, all of the controversy seems to have died, along with a few scattered boos from the audience, leading me to believe that the brouhaha was about as contentious as Atom Egoyan's direction of Die Walküre for the Canadian Opera Company, which happened to be fantastic. Looking duly forward to François Girard's vision of Siegfried in January.

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