owen lattimore – inner asian frontiers of china

In order of finding new blogs, the first and most common is from someone I already read who mentions another writer who may take my attention long enough to click through to their site. Getting from there to the ‘New Additions” folder in my RSS Reader (now using the quite beautiful yet assuredly beta Reeder), is a rarity, and from there to my sidebar is … well there’s scant connection really, it’s a rare thing when I go through all the links and add/subtract, and even then, with 300 or so in my news feed, my sidebar is only a few I like a lot.

So I added and subtracted. As usual, some blogs I loved very much have withered and passed the deadline of no longer updated (around 3 months before promotion to my ‘Dinasaurs’ folder), others have moved. Many new ones have arrived.

Excitement! I’ll not list all the new ones here, but there are a few, notably in ‘Art and Theatre Blogs’, as well as in ‘Asia and Central Asia Blogs’ and in the sciences categories. As for the ones that vanished …

I removed two sections. One for design as this stuff has moved mostly to my other blog (thingswithbits.info) and I don’t really get so enthusiastic about design as I do about, say, Central Asia or Kepler objects. The other to go, which is little more difficult to explain is the category for Trans* Queer Feminism stuff.

Without going into too much detail, there are still blogs I read in this field, but I find what turns up on these blogs is either irrelevant to me (e.g. cat blogging), the quality of writing does not have a level of rigorousness I find in other blogs I admire, or too often they are simply too American-centric. I’m also not so interested in spending a day in the echo-chamber finding the rare blog I would read.

So, for those who suffer distress when I blog infrequently, the sidebar should now assist you in feeling as I do most mornings: inspired by brilliant and passionate writers.

He didn’t quite, of course. Though he might have. I downloaded the a torrent of the film and in the midst of this, became curious about what Parsifal actually says, and even thought perhaps my libretto is a different version, but here Pasifal does say, not “Qual der Liebe!” but “Pein der Liebe!”

It is not the shock of Amfortas – his wound sliced from him, cushioned on black cloth, paraded, and leaking blood like an unholy vagina – that causes him to panic so; rather it’s his sudden violent awakening to suffering. He becomes human as the rest and sees utterly how this weakness, infirmity, poisoned Amfortas, Gurnemanz, and all the Knights, ruined Kundry, Klingsor, and every last person.

Syberberg’s Parsifal rests on this horror-stricken instant, these lines which I heard and did not hear, yet nonetheless it is there.

Roméo Castellucci’s Parsifal was also close during the four hours and fifteen minutes. Partly because this is my first return to Brussels since, also because I watched parts of the second act of the film during rehearsals, noting as well, aspects, stagings, intellectualisms, which came from that into his work. The singular difference though, is Roméo’s Parsifal is that of the titular role, whereas Syberberg’s belongs to Kundry.

I left the theatre exhausted, dry-mouthed, dazed. It is a harrowing four hours without pause, and one of the most transcendent moments of art I’ve ever lived through.

I’ll dispense with some technical notes first. The print was heart-rending. Badly scratched, dirty, especially towards the end of most reels, missing sections, and obviously cut together from more than one copy. Naturally this affected the sound also, at times a mess of noise, at others jumping and skipping, unsyncing itself in jarring cuts, and mostly soft, without detail, and slightly muffled.

It is so distressing that a film of such tremendous power is reduced so, and makes me fear for its future. While DVDs are available from Syberberg’s website, this is in no way comparable to the quality of a film print, especially for a film such as this.

Armin Jordan’s conducting would fit into what I probably erroneously think of as the standard arrangement. Its not quite the dramatic brilliance of Solti, and also I’m spoiled by Hartmut Haenchen, whose ideas on how it should be played to my mind bring forth something unique. I found myself wanting Jordan to go faster in places, to not linger so much, to find a sharper dynamic. Still, it’s beautiful and there is care and attention given throughout.

And this Parsifal is Kundry, as it rightly should be. There are two Kundrys, the voice is Yvonne Minton’s, and who we see perform is Edith Clever. Edith is so convincing I thought she was in fact the singer. She is brilliant. I fell in love with her, completely taken, and it was her performance that left me stripped and emptied.

Three Parsifals. Reiner Goldberg’s voice, first Martin Kutter, then Karin Krick, finally both of them. It was likely this that caused some to walk out during act two.

It begins with photographs under water, dirt-stained and begrimed. The camera circles over, sometimes nearer sometimes pulling away. The Reichstag gutted, the Statue of Liberty toppled and half-buried (I thought, is this from Planet of the Apes?), finding a Swan pierced by an arrow, a fetish object; a prelude, Kundry with a young impetuous boy, playing with his archery set, watched on by child-knights, and on into a puppet world, Bayreuth and the first Parsifal. Wagner is there also, but first we pass again by Kundry, asleep with a book open, an etching of the Knights of the Grail at their round table. She has a crown in her lap. She is in white, inky-blue stars around her waist, or perhaps black holes. Absences.

Behind is Wagner’s visage in profile, a death-mask. Here the action shall take place. Behind that is a dead puppet Wagner and Kundry again, and behind that, draped in a cloth, the world and the world tree – Yggdrasl.

More Wagners. The one pounding his baton into a bleeding ear; the one dressed in women’s pink silk attire, again darkness, this time emerging from a padded smoking jacket, the absent body giving it form, and in the depths, stars and night. A pure geometric solid breaks this. A rhomboid upon which a projection hovers. This all shall return, just as the overture’s leitmotifs are played out.

Even from these few minutes, the bottomless depth of this Parsifal is acute. Back through time and space it goes, trapping as in an autopsy all the parts that make a whole. It is perhaps also a judgement. As Wagner himself turns back towards the Germanic romantic history and its imagined form in millennia prehistory – the well-spring of his opera, Syberberg himself from a hundred years after the prémiere turns those years on Wagner. It is a work of love, yet it is never uncritical.

How do I write about such a piece? How do I remember it? I want to say it was for me as an epiphany. I also want to hold this feeling, to not pass it over for the next stimulation. Perhaps to say it is a meditation, a ritual; to go through those hours.

There are two moments when the theme, what this is about, is impossible to misconstrue. The first where Parsifal falls to Kundry in anguish as she tells of her (his mother’s) broken heart waiting for his return. The second at the end, The two Parsifals, male and female – though both so androgynous – come from within the rent crags of Wagner’s profile, regard each other and embrace. It is love.

It is not the confusion of Wagner’s platonic ideal, with its implicit misogyny and homoeroticism, nor of a christian one, burdened with guilt, obligation, and choking threat of punishment. Whether or not the spear Parsifal(Karin) wields closes the wound is perhaps less important than Kundry then lying beside, her last act one of sacrifice that releases the two Parsifals, closes this existential suffering under which all are enslaved. (The Knights no less for their role in perpetuating it, trapped in an endless deathlessness.)

From this, the two Parsifals freed, are able to meet, to see each other. It would be disingenuous as well as mediocre to read this as simply the reunion of male and female, though what this meeting posits, as well as Syberberg’s intention here is difficult to grasp. Perhaps here, the Buddhism which threads through Wagner’s conception of this opera, and which Syberberg never makes so explicit as he does other themes, comes forth. That Martin Kutter’s Parsifal is a beautiful, long-haired boy, feminine and slender, emotional in thought and expression, and Karin Krick’s is boyish, a Joan of Arc warrior in leather, her face blank of expression and emotions the barest flitting to impassivity, certainly undoes this simplistic reading, as well as any interpretation as Freudian familial drama.

As to why Parsifal changes (after the kiss, after “Wie alles schauert, bebt und zuckt – in sündigem Verlangen!…”) is equally elusive, though the overture hints at some possible readings. Nonetheless, she blames Kundry for this fall from salvation.

And Kundry. In the end, the choir sings, “Höchsten Heiles Wunder! Erlösung dem Erlöser!”, as the Parsifals greet each other, we find her lying, now crowned, next to Amfortas, around which all the Grails as they have been represented are accounted for, the world atop Yggdrasl now open and Theater Bayreuth therein, Wagner also nearby in an open libretto, skeletal corpses of the Knights around. The camera pulls back into darkness, emerges from the eye of the iron skull of a bishop in the same water as the overture, crowned and propped up like a macabre edifice, barring permanently any sentimentalism, romanticism the opera’s resolution so seductively and easily gives, and on out, the theatre coming into focus again, embraced in a glass ball by Kundry. She stares unblinking through the final notes until they pass, her eyes grow heavy. Sleep.

Also with this was a photo I took while in Brussels at La Monnaie, when we got onto the stage during the day, alone and made some suspensions and photos.

Mostly I only see my photos on screens, and this hides much, so seeing my photo of Gala and Dasniya, suspended while around the first act forest of Parsifal loomed, printed on high quality stock, gave me a smile.

You can enjoy it here scanned, or see it as it should, in print, in Mein lesbisches Auge 10 – Das lesbische Jahrbuch der Erotik from www.konkursbuch.com

vera schwarcz – the chinese enlightenment

paul hockenos – joschka fischer

jardin

5

4

3

2

1

fin.

(For those who would like copies of the embedded video and audio (with no easy or obvious download links) on some of these sites, I’ve downloaded it all. And for those who want any of this once the links expire, I have all the pages saved as they originally appeared as .pdf.)

Press & Print Media

[OPERA] Parsifal un enchantement musical – Culture – Nouvelobs.com
Avui+ – Notícia El camí solitari
BELGIENINFO.net Urenkelin Nike interpretiert Wagners “Parsifal”
Drammaturgia.it – Parsifal
Opéra Romeo Castellucci met en scène un “Parsifal” hallucinatoire – LeMonde.fr
FT.com – Arts – Parsifal, La Monnaie, Brussels
Review – Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels – NYTimes.com
Rue du théâtre – Le roi Richard ! – Parsifal
Sind wir nicht alle ein bisschen Parsifal? – Nachrichten Print – DIE WELT – Kultur – WELT ONLINE

Blogs

Ars Super Omnia Parsifal em Bruxelas
Hadrian est où? Richard Wagner’s Parsifal @ De Munt 15-02
Ionarts Parsifal with Ropes
Leidmotief Lezingen rond Parsifal in Brussel
Leidmotief Parsifal in De Munt een recensie (3)
Leidmotief Parsifal in De Munt een recensie (4)
Leidmotief Parsifal in De Munt perscommentaren
Opera Cake Castellucci’s Parsifal in Brussels
Opera Today Parsifal in Brussels
Parsifal (Richard-Larsson-Haenchen-Castellucci) La Monnaie – Histoire de l’Opéra et vie culturelle parisienne pour fervents lecteurs
Recensie en foto’s  Parsifal  De Munt Brussel
recortes y periodismo Parsifal en Bruselas bajo “brillante trabajo” del director Romeo Castellucci
Richard Wagners Parsifal à la Castellucci in De Munt | Dupslog

Video & Audio

“Parsifal”, de Wagner, à Bruxelles – videos.arte.tv
VIDEO Romeo Castellucci Parsifal – Richard Wagner – Bruxelles | FILMS7 MUSIC

It’s almost 4am, I should be going to sleep but all I want to do is …

Hosni Mubarak resigns as Egypt prez: Video of Tahrir square first reaction

The Egyptian people have toppled Mubarak, an extraordinary moment, but the regime has not been toppled, not yet.
‘This Is Who Egyptians Are’
Iran: Hope, Joy, Envy as Egypt Breaks Free
Egypt: The Vlog before the Revolution
Egypt: The World Rejoices as Mubarak Resigns
Mubarak steps down. Egypt Uprising wins the first round…
Triumph as Mubarak quits
What next for Egypt?
Where does Mubarak go now? [Updated]
Timeline: Egypt unrest
Egypt: The Moment of Triumph
Twitter: #egypt, #jan25

Today I have read a number of articles and blog posts that are high exemplars of thoughtful analysis and to me underscore the brilliance of new media as it has grown in the past several years; individuals who are unabashedly passionate about their fields on interest and recognise the importance of their voices in providing not just a bulwark against the endless mediocrity and often willful disingenuousness of commercial media, but often altruistically providing considered, articulate, educated writing that could exist nowhere else.

Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology today wrote a piece that at its absolute minimum is all this: ‘The last free people on the planet’. It’s over 11000 words (and that’s before even clicking any of the extensive links or further reading), so find a spot in the sun if you’re in Brussels, along with something to drink, take an hour and read this.