I need to get out more. Staying home puts too much pressure on my blogging. I have two ideas for today’s blog, much better than when I sit here hoping that one comes to me. Time out, the WQXR announcer said “Richard” Strauss with “Richard” pronounced like Richard Nixon not the German “Rick-hard” Is she going to pronounce Richard Wagner as if it were English? Civilization is in a crisis if I can’t depend on WQXR to pronounce foreign names correctly. I’ve been worried ever since they went from saying “concerti” to the barbarism, “concertos.” We must uphold standards of pronunciation or all is lost. It’s a small step from Rich-erd Wag-ner to fascism.
I just got distracted and that’s good. I like what I am planning even more. There is substance and other people will care about it.
But first, sorry, I have to tell about my life. Today I performed my one Budgiedome duty that is official with legal ramifications. I signed an affidavit saying that a Canadian performer is signed to play The Budgiedome. She needs that to legally come here and play. We do this every year and every year for some reason or other she can’t make it to Falcon Ridge. But she needs this so she can play other gigs that she hasn’t booked yet. It has to be done well in advance. This year I added a performance clause. If she doesn’t play she owes us chocolate. This is not a scam. She really does intend to play, it’s just hat something has always come up. I have to sign this so many months in advance. We can’t even wait until NERFA when I could sign it in person. She emails me the form. I print it out, sign it, scan the printed form, and email it back to her. I get a kick out of the entire process. The fact that she’s on my favorite people list makes it even better.
Now on to music, art, and philosophy. When I was in the first flame of my Hedwig Love and needed to tell everyone about it, my friend reacted by saying, “It’s too gay for me.” I was dumbfounded. She is not in any way a homophobe. What she meant was that she couldn’t relate. I was still dumbfounded The fact that the principles are LGBTQ, Hedwig needs a designation of her own, does not make it a gay play anymore than Romeo and Juliet being set in Verona makes it an Italian play. Would anyone suggest that Wagner’s (You better start that with a V sound) Ring Cycle is about gods and demigods means that if you aren’t a god or a demigod you can’t fully appreciate it? Is A Midsummer Night’s Dream for fairies and Athenians? Is Fiddler on the Roof just for Jews? I don’t think it would have run as long as it did if that were so.
These plays are about people, with human emotions, even if the people are not technically human. That’s what art does, highlights human emotions by putting it into different settings, They are often unusual settings, outside the experience of most people. That serves to show the universality of the subjective experience. We didn’t grow up in mafia families but we can all relate to the characters in The Godfather Very few of us are Hobbits, Dwarves, Elves, or Wizards, but we love the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I don’t love the latter but you get my meaning.
The other day I saw the Anna/Kate band. I think about what I’m going to write, before I even get to where I’m going. Anna/Kate started as Two Queers and a Uke. They are queer. I knew that but my feeble memory told me that their songs didn’t reflect that. I was wrong. They are often about that. It just doesn’t stop me from relating to the songs or the people. So they are gay women and I’m a straight man, it just means transposing the key, the relationships stay the same. I’m a math guy. We are used to that. We call them isomorphism, or homeomorphisms, or homomorphisms, and many other things depending on what relationships are maintained.
If there’s a gay, Irish, Jewish, or any subgroup band that only people in the group can appreciate, then it’s just not that good. People like it because they like songs being about themselves. Art transcends identity. Tolkien understood this. This might not seem to be on topic, but it’s dead on.
“Eomer said, ‘How is a man to judge what to do in such times?’
As he has ever judged,’ said Aragorn. ‘Good and evil have not changed since yesteryear, nor are they one thing among Elves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”
Wise Madness 