Irwin Schrött, Uruguyan baritone and partner of Anna Netrebko, is running a Twitter competition asking which celebrity one would like to take to which opera.  My entries so far:

The Pope to Verdi's Don Carlos
James and Rupert Murdoch to Menotti's The Telephone

This entry was originally posted at http://chickenfeet.dreamwidth.org/1012280.html. You ( Read more... )

Inspired by Mr. Persse McGarrigle's celebrated work on the influence of TS Eliot on Shakespeare(1), I am thinking about a similarly scholarly effort documenting the influence of Monty Python on Rossini, Bellini and Verdi. This is partly brought about by the rather striking resemblance of Edita Gruberova, as Norma, to Terry Jones as Brian's mum and ( Read more... )

So over on Twitter some of us are busy creating the fantasy version of an operatic version of DraculaThus far we seem to have settled on Thomas Ades as the preferred composer and there is general agreement on the major male roles and ideal casting ( Read more... )

a propos of nothing much lemur_catta and I got onto the subject of tribute bands this morning. Now the standard was set pretty high by the BIL's former band The Fancy Sinatras but we did come up with The Rolling Clones and The Deathwatch Beatles. More?

What do the following books have in common:

Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
Sharpe - Blott on the Landscape
Gide - Strait is the Gate

I promise that this is slightly more sensible than figuring out why Texas is like Lancashire.

David Lodge claims, in Author, Author, that Queer Theorists purport to have identified an extended metaphor for anal fisting in Henry James' introduction to the revised New York edition of his works. I would be fascinated to read a description of anal fisting in the rather orotund style of the late Mr. James. I lack the dexterity to write ( Read more... )

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NSFW

( England 12 Australia 10 :
France 20 New Zealand 18 )

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( Long Live the Feline Socialist Republic! )