the sea in winter
36 days until the vernal equinox
Ella has dark hair and a small mouth and large eyes, a paisley scarf wrapped around her neck and black clothing. She’s not an artist.
I met several dogs: Aylin, a rescue husky mix puppy; Max, a beagle; Yarn, a dog; Tucker, a spotty boy; and Mino, a fluffy boy.
And here’s Drake being a floppy boy.
As of now, I still haven’t eaten at Sài Gòn Fusion and probably never will but I will point out that Vietnam’s relation with the US is a lot like Avernum’s relation with General Baziron, that is to say, they’re pretty definitely our best friend on mainland Asia and despite the boat people’s protests, no administration, aside from probably Trump, will risk destroying it.
If you’re wondering, the day phở loses its luster is the day that Sài Gòn Fusion and Phở Basil close down. I dunno, actually. I think Sài Gòn Fusion will close down and Phở Basil will rebrand itself as Uncle Hồ’s Family Feedbag.
On the other hand, if there are any phở restaurants in Cambridge, they’ll survive for a few more years on techno utopians who are behind the times before becoming Ahmed Ben Bella’s Magic Tagine, at the risk of pissing off Revere’s Moroccan community. On the other hand, the Lebanese will be like “eh, as long as they acknowledge us as the inventors of the shawarma.”
For what it's worth, I wasn't planning to eat at Sài Gòn Fusion because I was late getting in and for once it wasn't the MBTA's fault.
Well, maybe the fact that it took for fucking ever to leave Braintree was their fault.
It was nice enough to eat outside.
Chloë (the diaresis can go over the o or e but in French, the accent is over the é) is from Charlottesville, VA, where I’ve actually been but that was decades ago. It’s kinda infamous for a Nazi rally and Trump saying there are good people on both sides, which, no, there weren’t. Someone drew her earlier in the week. She’s a poet who is studying psychology and dabbles in art. She took a picture and says she’ll always keep it close to her heart. She has a lot of bracelets on one hand. The next person I drew had short dark hair and glasses and a bag with constellations and various pins on it and a t-shirt with Snoopy in a space helmet being the first beagle on the Moon or maybe Mars or something I couldn’t see because she, or mayhaps they, had a shirt over it.
I couldn’t see her very well but it looked like Pink-Hair, not to be confused with the pink-hair sitting across the aisle from me or the two pink-hairs in front of me, one of whom had floral tattoos barely visible on her back, had a tattoo in black and white with abstract geometric designs.
Haydn's first cello concerto, suggesting that there are others out there, was found in a Prague library in 1961. It wasn't a form that Haydn liked to use.
Bluebeard’s Castle, or in its original Hungarian A kékszakállú herceg vára, was written in 1911 (the libretto was written for Zoltán Kodály in 1908), didn’t win a prize because an opera with only two characters isn’t dramatic enough, and eventually premeired in 1918 with a new ending.
The guy behind me compared it to Stravinsky with his bursts of dissonance. I liken it to Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande and the way it just ebbs and flows without arias or recitatives.
We get some brief narration in English. The rest of the opera is sung in Hungarian. It's so radically different from most other European languages that it's hard to make a translation that flows like the original. Judit and Bluebeard enter the castle. The castle is dark. The stage and all but one of the statues was lit with blue lights. Judith is possibly a reference to the book of the Bible, in which the widow Judith seduces an Assyrian general so she can behead him and save Jerusalem from destruction. In Maeterlink’s play and in Dukas’ opera, she is named Ariane, like the Cretan princess in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.
Door One: the Torture Chamber. Xylophone and aggressive strings all make that same “shape” as the guy behind me put it. He really likes this part. The implements of torture are covered with blood.
Door Two: The Armory. It's opened to braying brass. The weapons and siege engines are covered in blood. Makes sense, I guess.
Door Three: A celesta and two violins. I wonder if Peter Quint is there. No, it's just the treasure room. All the riches within are dappled with blood.
Door four: The Garden. Strings and a horn solo. Blood stains the soil. Blood drips from the thorns of roses. Bluebeard is oblivious to this.
Door five: The Kingdom. I’m not going to do the colors for this one. The entire concert hall illuminated. A vast and magnificent kingdom. The dawn and the dusk. The sun, the moon, and the stars. Bluebeard’s singing comes with the full might of the orchestra and organ, while Judit is accompanied only by the ambient noise. A cloud casts a bloody shadow. Clouds red as blood. Bluebeard is oblivious to this.
In the Maeterlink play and Dukas opera, each of the doors reveal jewels. sapphires, pearls, emeralds, rubies, diamonds.
Door six: The Lake of Tears. It is dark again. An undercurrent of timpani, murmuring from the harp, the celesta, and the winds.
Judit puts Fe and C and O and N and H together and comes to the conclusion that Bluebeard a) murdered his previous wives and b) stuffed their carcasses behind door number seven. She demands she opens the last door, forcefully, and Bluebeard does so.
Door Seven.
The lights on the stage made it look like a spacetime anomaly.
Bluebeard’s previous wives arrive, in her cloak of scarlet silk and silver crown, in her golden crown and cloak of fire, in her mantle of darkening twilight skies. In the Perrault fairytale, they have all been murdered in most grisly ways while in Maeterlink’s play, they’re alive.
It’s the closest thing to an aria, though Judit interrupts with “more beautiful, more fair.”
György Kroó says that the doors represent cruelty, struggle, spiritual beauty, tenderness, pride, tears, and memories, the last two which are things to be hidden.
tThe music changes as Bluebeard offers her a diamond crown and a starry mantle. Judit walks through the door and it closes behind her. Bluebeard is sad. All is darkness. The orchestra plays motifs heard earlier which disintegrate away. The end.
Jeff Vogel thinks Bluebeard is some sort of spy and based the game Avadon on the opera.
As for the original ending, well. My poking around on the internet led me to some information I was not permitted to access. Academia. Go figure. But. It did give me the name of a book. Three minutes later, I have learned that Bartok added the celesta and xylophone between 1911 and 1918, and the ending was more or less the same plot-wise but sounded a lot more like Debussy and he thinks that Bartók felt self-conscious about it sounding very French. At one point in development, Bluebeard stops singing when he offers Judit her crown and mantle.
I may be the only person on the clearweb who is sharing information. If you’re going to use this information to write a paper on Bartók, the book is called Bartók Perspectives. Chapter 16. If you're going to use an AI to write your papers for you, well, I'm glad to do my part by hopefully poisoning it with stuff abuout Franz Josef Haydn, Vietnamese cuisine, and dogs.
It’s never been recorded, never even been performed, it’s just a sort of curiosity.
burning question: Hiába is süt kint a nap? Hideg marad? Sötét marad?
Ella has dark hair and a small mouth and large eyes, a paisley scarf wrapped around her neck and black clothing. She’s not an artist.
I met several dogs: Aylin, a rescue husky mix puppy; Max, a beagle; Yarn, a dog; Tucker, a spotty boy; and Mino, a fluffy boy.
And here’s Drake being a floppy boy.
As of now, I still haven’t eaten at Sài Gòn Fusion and probably never will but I will point out that Vietnam’s relation with the US is a lot like Avernum’s relation with General Baziron, that is to say, they’re pretty definitely our best friend on mainland Asia and despite the boat people’s protests, no administration, aside from probably Trump, will risk destroying it.
If you’re wondering, the day phở loses its luster is the day that Sài Gòn Fusion and Phở Basil close down. I dunno, actually. I think Sài Gòn Fusion will close down and Phở Basil will rebrand itself as Uncle Hồ’s Family Feedbag.
On the other hand, if there are any phở restaurants in Cambridge, they’ll survive for a few more years on techno utopians who are behind the times before becoming Ahmed Ben Bella’s Magic Tagine, at the risk of pissing off Revere’s Moroccan community. On the other hand, the Lebanese will be like “eh, as long as they acknowledge us as the inventors of the shawarma.”
For what it's worth, I wasn't planning to eat at Sài Gòn Fusion because I was late getting in and for once it wasn't the MBTA's fault.
Well, maybe the fact that it took for fucking ever to leave Braintree was their fault.
It was nice enough to eat outside.
Chloë (the diaresis can go over the o or e but in French, the accent is over the é) is from Charlottesville, VA, where I’ve actually been but that was decades ago. It’s kinda infamous for a Nazi rally and Trump saying there are good people on both sides, which, no, there weren’t. Someone drew her earlier in the week. She’s a poet who is studying psychology and dabbles in art. She took a picture and says she’ll always keep it close to her heart. She has a lot of bracelets on one hand. The next person I drew had short dark hair and glasses and a bag with constellations and various pins on it and a t-shirt with Snoopy in a space helmet being the first beagle on the Moon or maybe Mars or something I couldn’t see because she, or mayhaps they, had a shirt over it.
I couldn’t see her very well but it looked like Pink-Hair, not to be confused with the pink-hair sitting across the aisle from me or the two pink-hairs in front of me, one of whom had floral tattoos barely visible on her back, had a tattoo in black and white with abstract geometric designs.
Haydn's first cello concerto, suggesting that there are others out there, was found in a Prague library in 1961. It wasn't a form that Haydn liked to use.
Bluebeard’s Castle, or in its original Hungarian A kékszakállú herceg vára, was written in 1911 (the libretto was written for Zoltán Kodály in 1908), didn’t win a prize because an opera with only two characters isn’t dramatic enough, and eventually premeired in 1918 with a new ending.
The guy behind me compared it to Stravinsky with his bursts of dissonance. I liken it to Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande and the way it just ebbs and flows without arias or recitatives.
We get some brief narration in English. The rest of the opera is sung in Hungarian. It's so radically different from most other European languages that it's hard to make a translation that flows like the original. Judit and Bluebeard enter the castle. The castle is dark. The stage and all but one of the statues was lit with blue lights. Judith is possibly a reference to the book of the Bible, in which the widow Judith seduces an Assyrian general so she can behead him and save Jerusalem from destruction. In Maeterlink’s play and in Dukas’ opera, she is named Ariane, like the Cretan princess in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.
Door One: the Torture Chamber. Xylophone and aggressive strings all make that same “shape” as the guy behind me put it. He really likes this part. The implements of torture are covered with blood.
Door Two: The Armory. It's opened to braying brass. The weapons and siege engines are covered in blood. Makes sense, I guess.
Door Three: A celesta and two violins. I wonder if Peter Quint is there. No, it's just the treasure room. All the riches within are dappled with blood.
Door four: The Garden. Strings and a horn solo. Blood stains the soil. Blood drips from the thorns of roses. Bluebeard is oblivious to this.
Door five: The Kingdom. I’m not going to do the colors for this one. The entire concert hall illuminated. A vast and magnificent kingdom. The dawn and the dusk. The sun, the moon, and the stars. Bluebeard’s singing comes with the full might of the orchestra and organ, while Judit is accompanied only by the ambient noise. A cloud casts a bloody shadow. Clouds red as blood. Bluebeard is oblivious to this.
In the Maeterlink play and Dukas opera, each of the doors reveal jewels. sapphires, pearls, emeralds, rubies, diamonds.
Door six: The Lake of Tears. It is dark again. An undercurrent of timpani, murmuring from the harp, the celesta, and the winds.
Judit puts Fe and C and O and N and H together and comes to the conclusion that Bluebeard a) murdered his previous wives and b) stuffed their carcasses behind door number seven. She demands she opens the last door, forcefully, and Bluebeard does so.
Door Seven.
The lights on the stage made it look like a spacetime anomaly.
Bluebeard’s previous wives arrive, in her cloak of scarlet silk and silver crown, in her golden crown and cloak of fire, in her mantle of darkening twilight skies. In the Perrault fairytale, they have all been murdered in most grisly ways while in Maeterlink’s play, they’re alive.
It’s the closest thing to an aria, though Judit interrupts with “more beautiful, more fair.”
György Kroó says that the doors represent cruelty, struggle, spiritual beauty, tenderness, pride, tears, and memories, the last two which are things to be hidden.
tThe music changes as Bluebeard offers her a diamond crown and a starry mantle. Judit walks through the door and it closes behind her. Bluebeard is sad. All is darkness. The orchestra plays motifs heard earlier which disintegrate away. The end.
Jeff Vogel thinks Bluebeard is some sort of spy and based the game Avadon on the opera.
As for the original ending, well. My poking around on the internet led me to some information I was not permitted to access. Academia. Go figure. But. It did give me the name of a book. Three minutes later, I have learned that Bartok added the celesta and xylophone between 1911 and 1918, and the ending was more or less the same plot-wise but sounded a lot more like Debussy and he thinks that Bartók felt self-conscious about it sounding very French. At one point in development, Bluebeard stops singing when he offers Judit her crown and mantle.
I may be the only person on the clearweb who is sharing information. If you’re going to use this information to write a paper on Bartók, the book is called Bartók Perspectives. Chapter 16. If you're going to use an AI to write your papers for you, well, I'm glad to do my part by hopefully poisoning it with stuff abuout Franz Josef Haydn, Vietnamese cuisine, and dogs.
It’s never been recorded, never even been performed, it’s just a sort of curiosity.
burning question: Hiába is süt kint a nap? Hideg marad? Sötét marad?