Today in Offhand Sexist Remarks

More comments from the instructor of the certification course I've been taking, who is turning out to be pretty much a casually sexist random remark generator.  This time the remark is about the good city of Austin, Texas, which is home to many famous people that one might encounter while buying coffee.  This apparently includes Sandra Bullock with her now ex.  The ex was forthwith described by the instructor in disparaging terms about his appearance with an appended "how did he get Sandra Bullock?"  Clearly then, women are gettable things and physical appearance of the getters is necessary and sufficient to completely describe the likelihood of success at getting.  Well done, everyone.

In which Sexism Leads to Incorrect Assumptions

This is completely shocking.

The teacher for this latest round of certification classes is actually a very good instructor, but he has a habit of making broad sweeping statements about what men and women are like.  I mostly try to ignore this.  But sometimes things bother me.  As, for example, when the instructor is talking about the spread of ebola and postulates that along might come Mr. Mosquito, to drink the blood of an infected person and then spread it through bites.  I interjected that this would have to be Ms. Mosquito, since that males don't bite.  The instructor rejoined that because human males are naturally more aggressive, he'd just assumed mosquitoes were the same way.  Even leaving aside points like sweeping generalizations and socialization issues, and how are we defining aggression anyway, this is what viewing the world via primate-centric gender binaries does to us.  It makes us wrong.  We have to let go of our prejudices to more accurately describe the world around us.

Abductions with Musical Accompaniment: the Utah Opera's Die Entführung aus dem Serail

A night at the opera!  My first such since before Tanzania!  How delightful!  The plans were the best laid, and as such, ganged aft agley, as my lovely sister was stricken sickly and I drove myself the whole way accompanied only by music and guilt.  Nevertheless, the Utah opera was presenting Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and while I fully expected it to be rather sexist and rather racist, because Mozart, I also expected the music to be breathtakingly lovely, because Mozart.

Music-wise, I was not disappointed.  The orchestra was fantastic.  I made friends with a knowledgeable lady sitting beside me who said that the Utah orchestra and opera are now one entity, so we were hearing the Utah Symphony Orchestra.  They played the heart and soul, not to mention the blood and the guts, out of that music.  A thousand bravissimis to the orchestra.  Seriously.  I was swept away from the first notes of one of Mozart's most kick-butt overtures.

I was also swept away by the entrance of the tenor, because he was wearing a really sparkly purple waistcoat and pretty gold shoes.  Between his costume, his sweet voice, and the orchestra, he made Mozart tenor arias not boring!  This is an accomplishment.  Then he stopped singing and I lost some of my enchantment. Entführung is, of course, a singspiel, with lots and lots of spoken dialogue which, presumably for reasons, was rendered into English while the sung pieces remained in German, which made the transition between singing and speaking very jarring indeed.  To make matters worse, throughout the presentation, several of the cast were having projection issues, but since I was close enough to see their mouths moving and just couldn't hear them, the general impression was that they were singing in dubbed-in German.

To continue, Pedrillo, in a nice green, was adequate, but not fabulous.  It seemed as if he wasn't quite fully committed to what he was doing on stage.  He did achieve full commitment and a beautiful moment in act three with his comic serenade, but until then he was rather shown to a disadvantage at having to share with stage with, first, Osmin, and later Blonde.  Osmin was wonderful.  Gustav Andreassen is not only a great bass (with a few projection issues at the beginning, but most of them were having those.  The orchestra was fully committed to their dynamics and the singers couldn't always keep up), he is the sort to dance about doing headslides while gleefully singing about executing people.  He was also in pretty red (stereotypical, but oh well) Turkish-ish robes and pretty red shoes.

The costumes were all rather wonderful, actually, with the notably notable exception of Konstanze's.  It's cake-topper pink poof, with presumably several layers of Crinoline of Doom beneath, and topped with a wig that looked like a toy poodle might have died on her head.

Konstanze, with the head of the Pasha taking up space in the foreground.
The Pasha is struggling to have real facial expressions. 

At least she made up for it by being unable to project in the lower registers and becoming unpleasantly strident in the upper registers.  A lady sitting next to me who is more familiar with the Utah Opera assures me that Celena Shafer is normally quite good and pretty-voiced, and was just having an off night.  Nevertheless, between her vocal failings and her one acting trick of jerkily bending forward with every dramatic phrase (for emotion?) I was not impressed.  It would have been really funny if Konstanze's music in any way supported anything but tragedy and tragic resolve, but it doesn't, and the wonderful wonderful orchestra continued to be fully committed to performing the heart and soul out of the music.  Her scenes with the Pasha just made all her problems worse.  The artistic director, who deserves all credit for having the surname of McBeth, saw fit to cast himself in the strictly spoken role of Pasha Selim, where he demonstrated that for all his directorial prowess, he has almost no personality whatsoever on a stage and attempts to make up for it with a sparkling lavender and gold robe.  Far be it from me to ever discourage a man from standing about in a sparkling lavender and gold robe, but between his standing and and Konstanze's oddly jerky emoting, the tableaux created between them was approximately as compelling as a school of jellyfish with tutus.  Appropriately enough, his entrance was hailed by a chorus whose members all had remarkably bad posture.  Back to complaining about Celena Shafer's Konstanze:  she really bugged me during "Martern Aller Arten," which is a very powerful piece of music that I happen to love, that she performed so very poorly.  She got through it, though noticeably running out of breath at points.  I mean, sure, it's hard, but that's what coloraturas are paid for.  During the final phrases, she was on her knees clutching at the legs of the Pasha.  No.  Just no.  The final phrases are defiant, not supplicatory.  Listen to the music!   This piece is when Konstanze stops being whiny and possibly in love with the Pasha (which is hard to understand with this Pasha) and declares she will die rather than love him.  Any supplicating has to take place in the middle of the aria  and then only when she promises that the Pasha will be rewarded by heaven for having mercy.  When she is declaring that she will suffer torture and die, she should not be draped beseechingly on the Pasha or lying on the floor.  I am officially over her.  Actually, that's a lie.  Later on I ended up being fascinated, because Belmonte gives Konstanze the portrait of her that he has been carrying around with him.  I think to demonstrate how devoted he has been, but she spends the rest of the scene holding onto the portrait, alternately staring at it beatifically and clutching it to her breast.  She is doing this to a portrait of herself.  The unbridled narcissism was inspiring.

Amy Owen, singing Blonde, was significantly more fabulous.  She was great. Her opening aria sounded like she was working a little too hard, but ever after that she had a light and lovely tone.  Where her colleague soprano, was boring if not annoying, she easily held my attention and won my love.  Her Blonde is the type to play on swings, fondle the biceps of the supernumeraries, take off her shoes and dance barefoot, and lecture Osmin while standing on a chair.   Quick, the Shakespeare signal! Someone needs to compare her to a summer's day!  Also, I wish I could make some bilingual pun with "Aupres de ma Blonde" here, but I don't have the language skills.   Anyway, to repeat, she was great.  Especially when Pedrillo and Belmonte demand assurance of faithfulness from women who have been kidnapped by people to whom consent isn't really a thing, Blonde responds by slapping Pedrillo.  That is exactly the response that deserved.  Konstanze just gets mopey.

A slap and indignation is also not how I was expecting a Mozart opera to handle that.  Given the unapologetic misogyny of say, Cosi fan Tutti with regards to faithfulness, I was pleasantly surprised.  While I'm on the subject, Entfuhrung isn't quite as overtly racist as I was expecting either.  I mean, sure, the whole set up is "these evil dark/Islamic people have taken 'our' women" but by and large the Muslims get a fairly fair shake.  As is historically accurate (well, maybe not with the Ottoman Turks, my memory is shaky here, I think I'm actually thinking more the Arab leaders in the Crusades, e.g. Saladin, but probably to Mozart & co, Arabs/Turks/Moors/Persians are a sort of homogeneous conglomerate of Otherness), a Muslim leader demonstrates far better ethics than his European Christian counterparts, and that rather makes up for the icky "let's get the Muslim drunk despite his religion, ha ha ha!" scene.  In fact, Osmin rather transcends all attempts in the libretto to make him look foolish here, though that is mostly because Andreassen is such a phenomenally better actor than his colleagues on stage who are attempting to make him look theatrically foolish.  There is a giant and prominent crescent and star on the gates to the Pasha's garden, which is rather weird, since it's analogous to Christians just building steeples on the roofs of their homes, but meh, it's Utah.

It was a good night at the opera.  It wasn't the level of opera of, say, the Houston Grand Opera, but it was fun and entertaining despite some flaws.  Honestly, it would be worth it just to hear that music performed with such understanding and commitment by that orchestra.  Such music will cover a multitude of sins.

Necromantic Sex and Unborn Children Singing to Batman

Because I'm stuck a few km to the left of center of nowhere here, my live opera experiences now arrive courtesy of the Bavarian Staatsoper, which streams live and free out of Munich.  Turing bless them.  If they would offer sufficiently low definition streaming options that I could have enjoyed their productions in Tanzania, Turing would bless them even more.  Yesterday they presented the Angsty Strauss' Die Frau Ohne Schatten.  I knew nothing about it prior to watching it.  Musically, it's sort of meh.  I've never been particularly moved by the instrumental music of R. Strauss, and I don't find that his vocal lines add anything memorable.  It's not bad, it's just that there's nothing in it that I remember five minutes after hearing it.  Plotwise, it's kind of like a cooler and more surreal version of The Magic Flute but without the awesome music, and instead, even more misogyny.  The libretto blatantly and inescapably presents a moral that women who can't have or don't want children are less than human or evil, respectively.  During one of the intermissions, this was actually addressed on camera by the director (I think.  I missed half the intermission talks due to needing to get drinks and snacks.  It was a four hour opera.  I needed the breaks.) who at least recognized, and attempted to mitigate, this aspect of the opera.  His take on the misogyny was to say that since this was an opera that came out of Germany around the time of the Great War, we can interpret the opera as a call for a continuation of life after the most destructive war then known rather than as a call for women as breeding stock.  I don't know that the text supports this or that this mitigated message really came through in the production, but I do appreciate the production team for trying.  It's not their fault that all the operas of the canon are written by (and largely for) men.  If anyone out there can write an opera, message me and I'll write a libretto and we can work on fixing this.

Anyway, the opera.  We open in the spirit world, where a nurse is creepily giving an injection of some sort to a woman in a ballgown.  Through expository recitative, we learn that the ball-gowned woman is the half-human daughter of the undefined Keikobad, and she doesn't have a shadow. What this Keikobad or the spirit world is, we don't actually know, but it seems vaguely reminiscent of Faerie, but everyone wears formal clothes and hangs out in a creepily lit room with a giant aquarium. The half-human woman is also the Kaiserin, because the Kaiser was hunting and encountered her when she was magically in the form of a white gazelle and they have gotten along swimmingly ever since except for she can't have children (the euphemistic meaning of a shadow here).   This is bad and also BAD because falcons show up, wander about surrealistically, and portentously portent that because the woman casts no shadow, the Kaiser is going to turn to stone in three more days.  The Kaiser doesn't know about this and wanders off to hunt, because that's all he ever seems to do.  The Kaiserin asks the nurse to help her get a shadow so her lover won't turn to stone and they toddle off to the human world to get one.

Scene switch to a shabby laundromat, the abode of Barak the dyer and his three stereotypical brothers: a man in plaid pants and a sweater vest, a blonde man with lots of eyeliner and a t-shirt I'm not hip enough to understand, and a man with long dreaded hair.  The brothers are just freeloaders, and they dislike the dyer's wife.  The feeling is mutual.  The dyer's wife is not so down with her Angel in the House role.  She doesn't want children, doesn't like sharing her marital home with her husband's brothers (who did wake her up fighting with each other for a piece of bread), and is generally just unhappy. So when the Nurse and the Empress show up and the Nurse offers her blonde hair, freedom from childbirth, and a hot guy in briefs and headphones(and people think I'm kidding when I say I watch opera for the fanservice) she is ready to make a deal.

Story character 101: avoid making weird deals with complete strangers.

Nevertheless, the wife (she never gets a name or more of a title than wife) offers her shadow in exchange for 3 days of service from the Kaiserin and the Nurse plus wealth and hot guys in briefs and headphones.  In the meantime, before giving up her "shadow" she confesses her distaste for her husband's bed, and so the dyer and his wife get separate beds while the creepy chorus of unborn children sings in the background.  That night, the unhappily married couple go to separate beds without ever talking about their unhappiness, and the night watch, instead of an all's well, serenade the city with a chorus on the joys of matrimony.

You spouses, who lie lovingly in each other's arms, You are the bridge spanning the chasm on which the dead come back into life.

Married people sex: it raises the dead.

I realize that I am an evil feminazi opposing traditional marriage here, but desire for children or lack thereof should really be something discussed before marriage, and if there is no desire for such, that's what contraceptives are for.  Do I need to do a condom demonstration for opera characters?  If it's a problem with the sex, there are conversations, books, and for some cases, doctors for that.  Not that this is probably a marriage based on equality since the nameless wife is identified as a beggar's daughter, so she probably has no options other than marriage at the terms of her husband, who, she comments, wants his dinner and his bed whenever he comes home from work.

Whatever.  The awkward state of their marriage continues for the contractual three days, during which time the wife angsts over, but ultimately refuses, the gift of the hot guy in briefs and headphones. But then her husband brings the entire children's choir home for dinner without warning, thinking this will make her happy, and she snaps and screams at him, including a fanciful account of the awesome sex with the hot man in briefs and headphones.  He nearly kills her with a sword he has from somewhere, but then everyone thinks better of their passions (how unoperatic!) and goes to bed.

They all wake up in part of the spirit world to await the judgment of Keikobad, who, like Sarastro before him, is coming across as petty and sadistic, as the dyer and the wife wait miserably in a giant waiting room while dead horses and soldiers float slowly past the windows.  While they stew in their unhappiness, a messenger of Keikobad shows up, calls the Nurse a bitch, and tells her that while it was the will of the Keikobad that the Kaiserin run to the human world, the Nurse is cast out of the spirit world for failing to protect the Kaiserin and keep her in the spirit world.  This is illogic of first order pettiness.  But the opera continues and Keikobad ends up deciding that everyone has overcome their trials and gets rewarded with (in the case of the women) their own shadows, and (in the case of the men) women who can make babies.  The Kaiser doesn't have to turn into stone after all, and the wife is going back to being a dutiful wife.  Huzzah?  The creepy chorus of unborn children arrives on stage to play shadow puppet games on the back wall of the stage and sing about happiness.  Meanwhile, giant animated images of (I swear I am not making this up) Batman, Jesus, Gandhi, King Kong, Marilyn Monroe, Sigmund Freud (I think), and Buddha are projected onto the walls of the set.  To demonstrate that I am not making this up, I have a screenshot.

I am suffering from a complete failure of intellect and imagination to explain this cast of characters in the context of the opera.  Or, frankly, any context whatsoever.  Darling readers, please tell me why and how this makes any sense.

Close Encounters of the Wyoming Kind: Tools! For Great Wifedom!

The other day in the gym, my sister and I were setting up our aerial rig in preparation to working out on the silks  This involves assembling some steel beams and using a wrench to bolt them together.  It's fairly simple.

One of the more elderly gentlemen who take their morning constitutionals in the gym, seeing this, remarked that because we can use tools, we will make good wives one day.  I have many problems with his comment.  First, saying I use a tool is sort of a meaningless statement.  Humans are tool-using animals.  Not by any means the only animals that use tools, but it's a thing we do.  The aerial rig itself is a tool, we drove to the gym in a car, which is a tool, and earlier that morning I used a coffee grinder, an electric kettle, a coffee press, and a coffee mug.  Later that morning I used a computer.  But since tools for mechanical and/or manual labor are more stereotypically for men (Sojourner Truth and Rosie the Riveter be damned) than, say, the applicator I used for spreading sparkly green polish on my fingernails, they are more important, even though putting on nail polish actually requires significantly more muscle control and skill than turning a bolt with a wrench.  I mean, it's a wrench.  It applies mechanical advantage to a bolt such that I don't need much in the way of skill or muscle when turning it.  That's the whole point.   I am, however, a woman, so my ability to use a manly tool such as a wrench, particularly since it isn't a specially marketed pink lady-tool, is surprising and worthy of note.  

My other major problem is the statement that using a non lady-tool will make me a good wife someday.  What exactly non-gender-stereotyped tool-use has to do with forming a government-recognized partnership based on mutual love and respect I do not know.  I do know that he probably doesn't think of marriage in an egalitarian sort of way if he makes this statement, but I'm going to ignore that.  I have skills.  I have skills now.  I use skills to accomplish tasks now.  I am using my remarkable tool-using skills in despite of my ladyness in order to be an aerial dancer.  That's a skill to be proud of.  There is nothing wrong with marriage, and if it is implemented well, there can be quite a few things right with it, but to imply that this is the apex and end of accomplishments for a woman is insulting.  I am a dancer whether or not I am married, and that accomplishment is an accomplishment to be recognized that has nothing to do with marriage.  Come to that, my ability to use a wrench, is a skill (such as it is) that does not need to be modified by marriage.

What I'm getting at is that this man is refusing to recognize that I am a skillful person now in myself.  If in my life I marry, I imagine I will be rather skillful at that too, but it doesn't take marriage to make use of my skills and be a good person.  To imply, or blatantly state, otherwise is an insult.