Parrot Jungle sucks

Note: more pictures will be posted later

Unless you have a mean parrot fetish (and it's cool if you do), Miami's Parrot Jungle Island is skippable. The place is built on sensationalism (Liger! Crocosauros! Albino alligator!) and massive amounts of concrete; I like to refer to it as (Parrot) Concrete Jungle. At least the weather in Miami is gorgeous (70 degrees, mostly sunny, low humidity). Under such skies, pacing in a parking lot would have beat spending another day in dismal Cambridge.

The first creature I wanted to see was the liger, the lion-tiger hybrid that grows to enormous sizes. Parrot Jungle says that their liger stands 12 feet tall and weighs 900 pounds. I quickly found the exhibit and for a good ten minutes I admired the liger, which paced back and forth near the front of the exhibit and frequently made eye contact with gawkers. I thought it was kind of odd that the liger, though large, was white, because the pictures around the exhibit showed a goldish animal.

Imagine my surprise when the creature walked to the rear of the exhibit and stood up on its hind legs, and right next to it, from behind a tree, emerged a monster twice its size. Turns out I had been looking at a white bengal tiger all along. I was so caught up in feeling stultified that the awe didn't quite set in, and my liger encounter ended up being quite anticlimactic. It didn't help that the first behavior I saw this majestic creature perform was urination.



Crocosaurus!

Next on the list was Crocosaurus. I stumbled upon this creature, because there was no sign at the upper level of the serpentarium, from which I first spotted this saltwater crocodile. The sign on the lower level said that it measures nearly 20 feet long and weighs 2,000 pounds, which makes it the largest crocodile in captivity in the US. Basking, the animal remained still, only once moving a leg.

The exhibit is mere spectacle. There was no information about saltwater crocodiles, nothing about diet, habitat, reproduction. Like the liger exhibit, which featured clips of the animal making appearances on Leno and other TV shows, and to which was annexed a kiosk offering stuffed toy ligers for sale, this was set up as mere entertainment. Could have been a circus (minus the fun).

It's not only the stars who suffer from pathetic displays. I paraphrase a card at the serpentarium: "The Jamaican boa is not only the largest snake in Jamaica, but also the most attractive." Thank you for the accurate zoological research. Snakes don't register on my zoodar, but I'm glad to know that the folks at Parrot Jungle know hott when they see it.

Status check

Just meta-blogical moment to take stock of things . . .

I'm launching this blog on January 8th, just after Renee Fleming's concert with the MET Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Since October I've been accumulating posts and testing them out with friends and a link on my Facebook profile. Site traffic has been way better than I would ever have expected, given that beyond these two avenues I have done no promotion.

Over the last few days I've been preparing three entries, plus finished versions of posts that are up here but in some state of incompleteness. I've left some unfinished work up here to gauge interest (who knew so many people wanted to read about the "Dolly Parton Paradox"?) The finished products will all be in place sometime between now and January 8th.

I've reread what I have so far and I've been thinking about where I want to go with this. I've always felt that blogs about people's personal struggles were so damn boring. I started this blog mainly to comment on the performances (indeed, the non-Facebook visitors to this blog have almost all been seekers of such things as "nathan gunn", "american tragedy" or "renee fleming") and events (readings, lectures, symposia) that I attend. But I'll also share tidbits about my experience as a literature graduate student at Harvard. It's colorful enough to merit blogspace.

When the conductor steals the show

I attended my first opera at the Met in late April or early May of 2001. I was in the second row of the orchestra--not bad for my first time, huh?--and Catherine Malfitano sang her legendary Emilia Marty on the closing night of the season. Though I had been attending classical performances since 1994, this was my first in a great house.

One thing I noticed was the visibility of the conductor, who stands on a rather high platform. (As a matter of fact, the orchestra is very visible at the Met. More on this another time.) The conductor at my first Met evening was none other than Sir Charles Mackerras, a man so closely associated with the operas of Leoš Janáček that I couldn't help but count his presence among the highlights of my Met initiation.

However, at this performance, and at all but two of the 23 other Met operas I have attended since, I don't believe I ever paid the slightest attention to the conductor. The first exception was that evening last September when, once again, I sat in the second row of the orchestra, this time in the very center and therefore directly behind Jesus Lopez-Cobos, who frequently blocked my view of Renee Fleming in Manon.

The second exception occurred on Saturday afternoon at the matinee of Carmen. I'm talking about Philippe Jordan. When he walked out, I was struck by his youthful looks. It turns out he was born in 1974. He made his Met debut in 2002. But I didn't know any of this during the performance. I only knew that I was so sucked in by his energy and charm that I spent half of the performance with my eyes on him, even at the height of the over-the-top spectacle of this production.

A ball of enery, he seemed to breathe this work, throwing wicked smiles here and there, sometimes bending down so low that he disappeared, and, most strikingly to me, mouthing during every chorus bit! Without fail. And even during some of the arias, he "sang" along, especially at cadenzas, holding his mouth wide open, as if he were the one singing. He commanded what sounded to my ears like a taut performance from that glorious orchestra. From my sixth-row orchestra seat, fortuitously located to the side, it was hard to focus on Marcello Giordani (not in his best voice that afternoon, with a good deal of difficulty in transitioning between registers) and what's-her-name who sang Carmen (gorgeous sound--evenness in all registers; warm, rich tone--but, physically, poorly cast).

At least there was Escamillo. Escamillo is supposed to embody masculinity, virility, all that. Like the Met production, he has to be played over-the-top. And Erwin Schrott certainly did that, even miming the muttering of sweet nothings and making extensive eye contact with Carmen and the other ladies. Oh, and Ana Maria Martinez, in her debut role in the Met, was a stunning Micaela. She has a gorgeous, elegant sound. It's not a metallic sound; it's more like a good light cream. I'm sure she'll be a big hit at her London Traviatas.

The Dolly Parton Paradox

[Coming soon]

Lieberson and Lieberson

I'll write on this later. Flew in to Miami tonight. Exhausted. (Still need to catch up on that Voigt post, but can't find the program, which contains all my notes. And will also post about the other stuff I attended this season that I haven't written about. If I can find a moment. Were grad students ever meant to blog?)

Coming soon

An American Tragedy - I read the Dreiser novel several years ago. I don't care what Harold Bloom thinks; I totally got into it, loved it. A few years later, stumbled upon A Place in the Sun. Eh. I've been reading about this production, and I'm super excited about the world premiere on December 2nd. Yes, I'll be there.

Brokeback Mountain - The full site for this movie must have launched a couple weeks ago. (Had been a while since I last checked.) Ever since Jake mentioned it on Leno last year ("It's about two cowboys . . . who fall in love"), I've been intrigued. Read the short story this summer. I rarely make it to the movies, but I'll be there for this one on December 16th.

Deborah Voigt

I'll report on this later. I am way behind on work.

Note: I am indebted to Sieglinde for the whole photoblogging-of-operas-and-concerts thing.

First snow

Beautiful diva

So, I wrote a freakishly long and detailed post about "Daphne" at Carnegie Hall for Renee Fleming's "Beautiful Voice" Yahoo Group. I've been a member for years, but became one of the handful of frequent posters only last October or November. I first met a fellow member in January, at the Met, and since then I've met over a dozen, as far away as London, when I was there in June. It's not your typical opera group. You won't find pretentious, bombastic queens in TBV group. Instead, you'll find people who are passionate about Renee, and some who are equally passionate about opera, without the idiosyncracies of the usual opera fanatics. No high culture snobbery, not many words that will have you running for a dictionary. In other words, it's a refreshing group of kind people who love Renee. Her biggest fans are a reflection of the diva herself: the essence of kindness, generosity, and warmth. Her voice is freakishly beautiful, and she's the most skilled exponent of her art, but neither of these is enough to explain our addiction. We worship the diva because she effortlessly walks the line between the sacred and the profane.

Sieglinde, who worships at the same altar--though in her own way--recently singled out my method.

PS, for those who read the post at TBV: Well, I did succeed in taking one picture . . .

Addendum: After reading this post, I winced at some of the statements I made. You probably did as well. Some need to be clarified ("pretentious, bombastic queens"--not all queens are pretentious and bombastic), supported ("the most skilled exponent of her art"--huh?), and so on. But I'm going to keep them up there, because they represent how I felt at the moment (i.e., drugged).

Things lately, unelaborated

Osvaldo Golijov's"Ayre" with Dawn Upshaw is just stunning. Upshaw played a track at her interview at Harvard last week, and I just had to hear more.

During the summer I didn't read a thing, beyond newspapers and magazines. There was one exception: Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain". Mercilessly painful and equally beautiful in roughly 20 pages, it moved me like nothing I can remember.

"Grizzly Man" was awesome. Treadwell was at home in the ferocious wild and yet he remained absolutely naive, bending nature to his shape rather than keeping a distance and attempting to understand it on its own terms. He never did understand it, and, more importantly, he never understood his own soul, never dealt with his own demons. One man interviewed in the film says that, in being eaten by a bear, Treadwell got what he deserved. I think he got what he wanted.