Well said Ace. Once again, we all completely agree.

I was really afraid to write that, but now I'm glad I had the courage of my convictions and dared all.

I'm sure I shook up a lot of the bourgeois opinions of the straights who read this site, and I just couldn't be happier to challenge those assumptions.

My next bit of guerilla-theater Opera of Outrage will be a 700 word screed on why John Kerry sucks.

Please-- I'm taking an awful chance here, guys. Do hit the tipjar, because I'm really pushing the envelope of what is "socially acceptable." Or get me an NEA grant, if you can. Either/or.

I believe that true artistic bravery can only occur in a climate in which one is fully insulated against any adverse reaction.

Good points. Important to remember that the "shocking" Beckett wannabe plays and dung sculptures are rendered not for the lay audience, but for the reviewers who play their role by perpetuating the artiste-reviewer/gadfly circle-jerk. Everyone knows about "Madonna Piss" or whatever it was called, but has anyone actually seen it? Of course not; the reviewers are the consumers, and the artists understand this. Poseurs fetishized by art's pilot fish.

Okay, I admit it. I would love to see the same terrorists they glorify attack a performance. It's mean, I know. But, it would serve them right.

. Do hit the tipjar,

Tipjar?

That thing works?

All along I thought you were making an ironic statement.

Of course its "moral" to murder innocent civies - Ward Churchill has assured me this is so.

It's not a British play, it's an American opera. Adams is a well-known exponent of musical 'minimalism'.

The piece was first blasted for pro-terrorist sympathies by noted musicologist Richard Taruskin, not long after 9/11. This actually happened in the New York Times.

So was Phil Glass - his stuff was terrible too.

If that's the same Philip Glass that wrote the interminable "Akhnaten": I had to sit through three fucking hours of that ear-shattering tripe because the girl I was dating at the time thought he was a genius. I should have known our relationship was doomed.

for those who don't know what the philip glass type of music sounds like, think of someone playing the same two chords over and over for an hour, only occasional playing them faster or slower, louder or softer.
Did you see the Onion piece some months ago about the artist who had again outraged the arts community by painting a portrait of Christ with no doody, vaginas, etc? A bunch of talentless goofs who need shock value to get attention.
Perhaps someone can write an opera about Hillary Clinton. Two tubas can represent her thighs.I am at work and being rushed...

OT - Ann Coulter's got a great column today.

"Meanwhile, every time Americans get a gander at these lunatics ranting about the "Great Satan" and the "Zionist entity," we can't believe we're at war with such a comical enemy. No wonder they dream of an afterlife with 72 hot teenage girls. These guys are klutzes. Nerds. Dweebs. In the Las Vegas of life they're at the convention center with the other "Star Trek" fans."

Indeed. Heh.

John Adams is a great American composer, some of his best pieces are his 'Harmonielehre' symphony and opera 'Nixon in China'. He's also a lefty living in San Francisco, but he's no political hack and it's a stretch to say 'Death of Klinghoffer' glorifies terrorists. They may be shown in too positive a light but they are the bad guys of the piece, unless some idiot producer in Britain stages it to seem otherwise. The leader of the terrorists Mamoud talks to the Captain of the songs he enjoys and how he grew up with real guns as toys which could make him seem somewhat human, but when the Captain says:

'I think if you could talk like this sitting among your enemies peace would come'

Mamoud replies:

'The day that I and my enemy sit peacefully each putting his case and working towards peace that day our hope dies and I shall die too'.

Later Klinghoffer tells off the terrorists:

'I've never been a violent man, ask anyone. I'm a person who'd just as soon avoid trouble, but somebody's got to tell you the truth. I came here with my wife. We both have tried to live good lives. We give gladly, receive gratefully, live and take pleasure in small things, suffer, and comfort each other. We're human. We are the kind of people you like to kill. Was it your pal who shot that little girl at the airport in Rome? You would have done the same. There's so much anger in you. And hate. I know how children in the promised land learn to sleep underground because of your shelling. Old men at the Wailing Wall get a knife in the back. You laugh. You pour gasoline over women passengers on the bus to Tel Aviv and burn them alive. You don't give a shit, excuse me, about your grandfather's hut, his sheep and his goat, and the land he wore out. You just want to see people die...'

The terrorist 'Rambo' replies:

'You are always complaining of your suffering but wherever poor men are gathered they can find jews getting fat...'

And these heroes kill the man in the wheelchair and throw the body overboard. I just don't see the angle that Adams has written a positive piece for terrorists, it's more a story of how people react when held hostage by murderous thugs. He's working on a new opera called 'Doctor Atomic' telling the story of how Robert Oppenheimer helped develop the nuclear bomb, which could be interesting. I don't think Philip Glass is as political though his music is an acquired taste (or not). His 'Aquas da Amazonia' CD is pretty accessible.

"They may be shown in too positive a light..."

Q.E.D.

Just tango-sympathizer rationalizations.

I have not seen "Klinghoffer". However, John Adams has written some wonderful music. The sequence "The Chairman Dances" from his opera "Nixon in China" has become a stable of symphonic concerts - or at least as much of a staple as something not written by a dead Viennese can be. His tone-poem "On the Transmigration of Souls", which commemorates the victims of the 9/11 attack, is a powerful work, well worth listening to - though it doesn't exactly set your toes tapping.

With regard to courage and opera, I recall attending a production of Carlyle Floyd's opera "Susanna", which is a retelling of the Biblical story of Susanna and the elders reset in Bible-belt America. The Bible-thumpers are, of course, hypocrits and retards - I know that's a shocker. And the program notes, of course, declared Floyd's opera to be "courageous" - as if it takes any courage at all to denounce Christian fundamentalists before a New York audience. It occurred to me, though, that a truly ballsy production of "Susanna" would set it in Riyad or Tehran. It would certainly be politically relevant - Muslim fundamentalist abuse of women is a global scandal, and one of the principal impediments to the Muslim world's progress. But as my Jewish friends would say, "You should live so long"; after all, the Muslim fundamentalists, unlike the Jerry Falwell types, really do kill people.

Hey, thanks Brown Line! You too, waels1! What would we do without your highbrow, enlightened critique of sissy-boy vanity plays and neo-poser mono-music. Like any dipshit couldn't knock out hours of that shit by flipping on a keyboard and going to take a crap or make a fucking sandwich.

By playing human shield for these talent-free outrage peddlers, you've done nothing but earn yourself the swirlies and the purple nurples I had saved up for when I meet these bespectacled douchebags coming out of whatever glory-holes you freaks hang out at.

"With regard to courage and opera..."? Yeah, we were really talking up a storm about that. It's all over the papers and shit.

Jee-zus.

Ace, I think you're too hard on yourself. You challenge my assumptions all the time. For example, I always assumed (without thinking about, or even questioning, it!) that no one could think Benny Mardones was offering to show a woman a duck.

"Wouldn't anybody, upon hearing the man sing about showing off a duck, immediately realize that he had misheard the lyric?" I assumed.

You proved me wrong, my friend. And that's just one example of you disproving my optimistic assumptions about the intelligence of the people around me.

Sorry you hate classical music and people who listen to it so much, spong. If you really think you can do better than John Adams with a couple hours fiddling on a synthesizer, do it and post it online to prove it. I think it would become apparent pretty quickly who was 'talent-free'. I wasn't defending the British producer who wants to show terrorists as heroic, but you knew that.

Maybe it's just me but when I read, hear or otherwise come into contact with this type of nonsense from Indoctrinated Leftist nimrods I'm reminded of the Raisins episode of South Park:

Stan: All right, so how do I join you?
Goth: If you wanna be one of the non-conformists, all you have to do is dress just like us and listen to the same music we do.

Goth: Dude, you haven't drank your coffee.
Stan: Well I don't drink coffee.
Goth: You can't be a non-conformist if you don't drink coffee.