2013 Arts in the City

Comic Con

If you guys want to see more pictures, let me know. I have SDCC 2012 photos in California and can upload them. Also, feel free to shoot me any questions about SDCC or NYCC, I’ll answer them as best I can. My email is kay@mit.edu, and I’m also on Facebook.

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It was a really good show.

The soprano who played the Marschellin debuted in the Ring Cycle as Sieglinde. I had seen her in Die Walküre, and it was wonderful to have that sort of connection here. I have also never seen a stage so cavernous or a set so intricate. I was astounded by the engineering. (And for those who didn’t stay until the third act, you missed an epic high-five in the orchestra pit.)

Script Doctoring

Shakespearean nerd that I am, I came into this with expectations, despite my best efforts to keep an open mind. It is still debatable if those expectations were met. I found the play diverting and entertaining. But I have to admit that it felt like a SparkNotes version of the play, the most stripped take the director could get away with and still be able to call it Shakespeare. With minimalist set, costumes, lighting, and special effects, the play depended on the acting and plot to drive it, but it had neither full cast nor plot. Cutting lines is one thing. Cutting death scenes and characters is another.

Lighting

As Jenny Hynes would put it, the lighting was “super pretty” for the classical ballet number: blue lighting to soften the stage and accentuate the somber tone of the music, and gold spotlighting on the dancers. The colour choice gave the piece an ethereal and attractive quality. Contrariwise, the Motown lighting changed depending on the mood the dancers were conveying at the moment. It appealed to the base associations we make to those specific colours: red for passion, green for envy, and so on. The tap dance focused on the dancers’ feet, and the lighting helped direct the audience’s attention appropriately. The performance of Rite of Spring used lighting to add depth to the stage and set, fiery orange depicting the glare of the sun, or the heat of an active volcano.

The Manson Murders

9 AUGUST 1969: Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, writer Wojciech Frykowski, coffee heiress Abagail Folger, celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, and 18-year-old Steven Parent are brutally murdered at the Polanski residence. Parent, a friend of Tate’s gardener and the first murder, is shot for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sebring is shot defending Tate. Frykowski and Folger, both heavily wounded, manage to escape the house; Frykowski is clubbed to death, and Folger is stabbed 28 times on the front lawn. Tate herself pleads for mercy, especially for the sake of her baby, but is stabbed in the stomach after being told that “[she is] going to die and [she had] better get used to it.” The word PIG is then smeared on the front door in Tate’s blood.

The subsequent day, Leno LaBianca, supermarket executive, and Rosemary LaBianca, his wife, are murdered in their home.

After investigation, it came to light that the murders on 9 August were committed by Charles Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian, and those on 10 August were by the hands of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten – all of whom were members of Manson’s Family. Charles Manson, charismatic career criminal, Armageddon fanatic, and sociopath, attracted a crowd of about a hundred people – mostly young, impressionable women who rebelled against their families – with a penchant for unorthodox living and hallucinogens to his cult of personality. He was deeply convinced, by end of times cults and ‘hidden’ messages in the Beatles’ White Album, that there was a race war on the horizon and his Family would be there to pick up the pieces; as such, he reasoned that they should be the ones to instigate it. He convinced these young people to commit these horrible, brutal murders of ‘beautiful white people’ in an attempt to start a war that would span the globe.

Manson himself never wielded a weapon. He merely talked his followers into the murders. He was initially given the death sentence (but was later convicted to life in prison, as the Supreme Court of California invalidated all death sentences before 1972) for first-degree murder on 25 January 1971.

(Due to the violent nature of the murders, I refrained from posting photos of them. However, here is a Beach Boys song that was written by Charles Manson – lyrics were then edited by Dennis Wilson, which led to death threats from Manson. Original lyrics can be found here, under the title “Cease to Exist.”)

Art is Quondam

Quondam: a word which here means ‘former,’ ‘one-time,’ or ‘erstwhile.’ The faded remnants of what once was, shadowed by new growth, remind us that even as the contemporaneous evanesces, life goes on.