Liu Xiaobo. Li Qiaochu. Yaqui Wang. Shining examples to look up to while we fight to regain our democracy. Will we meet the challenges and sacrifices as they have?
The always brilliant Thom Hartmann over at Raw Story(https://bit.ly/3OBrVZm) writes a distillation piece on today’s “conservative” movement aka the CNPP(Conservative Nazi Pedo Party) explaining its evolution since Eisenhower in the 1950’s to today’s dysmorphic conservatism that supports inequality based on a financial platform where government works only for the wealthy
This type of “I’ve got mine, screw you” political attitude currently has permeated all 3 levels of government and is far from what the conservative movement in the 1950’s meant which was to not radically or rapidly change society without first thinking through the consequences in detail, and then, when you do decide to make changes to the rules of society, you move forward in measured increments. Conservatively
Over decades of policies to ravage the principle that all men/women are created equal and aided by the likes of the John Birch Society, Reagan’s demand to cut social safety net programs, and Clarence Thomas’ corruption of SCOTUS, today’s conservative movement has become a fascist haven for the plutocratic wealthy class(Musk, Theil, Karp) willing to strike any corrupt deal that furthers their ends(Cheeto, Jared, Don Jr)
WE the People have slowly unconsciously witnessed the wealthy take over our country and turn it into a quagmire of corruption and graft It’s time to wake up and demand a equality and restore accountability
^^^ Bernstein's 'MASS' 1981 at the Kennedy Center (for cultural blah blah TK)
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I wonder if some of RDI's retinue were in attendance then and there.
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Sponsored by Shell Oil Company ...
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Maybe not so heavily by Raytheon etc.
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We are sooooo screwed.
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Works focusing on the preservation of nature and all it's biomes are gonna find very little Big corporate funding.
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Or at least not seem ludicrously hypocritical and moronic to an extreme degree, but as I see it these companies are not so in love with OIL either but (as previously stated) are in the Energy business and moreover the MONEY business.
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As previously stated these energy entities and oil companies historically have hedged their bets with copious alternate energy research.
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Seems their direction needs to be similarly bought - but right now it seems that beyond the straight of Oman is governed by insurance underwriters.
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As an underwriter you CAN indeed end up on the end of rope from a beam or ceiling fixture.
Tanglewood IS a BIG DEAL... (Many luminaries of our time having spent TIME there - not least for my money Benjamin Britten - TBH not such a great fan of the War Requiem - for ME. ).
You see the Americans never envisioned a totalitarian communist - capitalist country...
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They / We (not me) but 'We" Americans thought that with enough Coca-Cola and Mc Donalds and BAD Hollywood movies and really GREAT Buicks that they'd totally throw in the towel of 'Communist" control.
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We're talking about CHINA here - not America !!!
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Goodness...
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Up until the modern era South Korea was the model and success story of how to bring capitalism to the Far East / South East Asia a "Proven" model that could work (theoretically) again and again and agian.
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Seems in hindsight through various home grown corrupt and powerful families in South Korea that near Wester Style Capitalism was able to take root. ANNNNND eventually some sort of version or flavor of "Democracy / Democracon like we have here back in the ole' US of A.
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Turns out S. Korea was the EXCEPTION <--- ( All caps but not yelling - just emphasis as I have no other formatting tools available to me here in Substack this way ), and China still has a really long memory for the Opium Wars (turns out it wasn't " Just" the British that were in on that and various and massive crimes perpetrated by the Japanese of very recent history (by comparison).
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I DO have a lot of faith in China and Chinese youth in particular but actual change is going to be very very very slow. At some point I believe that Chinese youth ultimately will be the one's that drag the rest of the countries that divide this planet into some sort of "Environmental" compliance EVEN the Americans.
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Not in my lifetime (what's left of it and I'm not actually THAT old).
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Taiwan being the lynchpin really holds all of this (Sh*t) togther.
.
SEEMINGLY this week in particular nearly ALL and sundry seem to be engaging in some sort of 1984 (Orwell) styled double speak and double talk and double think.
.
The Emanual Goldstein passages being of the format of Righteous UP - UP - UP - UP themed rhetoric - word salad - word salad - (Inverted ) Down - Down - Down - Down rhetoric...
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Left - left - left - left
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Word salad,
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Word salad,
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(Counter positioned BUT crucially not counter posed)
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Right - Right - Right - Right - Right...
.
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Word -salad,
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LEFT - LEFT - LEFT - LEFT...
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Each contiguous block of like purposed prose being completely rational and fully operable to itself - coherent.
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THE SKILL of double talk and double think and double speak is the ART of the word - salad... The all important connecting layer and piece of stratigraphy that layer by layer glues this grizzly cake together...
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^^^ We've been seeing a LOT of that this week.
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Generally when people read 1984 (See Eric this is how they will erode you to read and perform Animal Farm that you hate so much.),
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"They" take the Emanual Goldstein passages WAAAAY too literally and try to decode their actual essence as being the terrifying codes of communist totalitarian entities.
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[I have written much about that in the past but obviously the work (1984) was essentially co-opted by Western propaganda offices to serve as a tool to inspire fear of Communist totalitarian systems re-cast and edited and re-framed for Cold-War purposes.
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^^^ The literal and actual THING that Eric Blair / George Orwell was specifically warning against - that his work (unironically) would be co-opted and trans-muted into the near-literal opposite article and message. And of course, ALL of the wit and clever sarcasm scrubbed out and Orwell's treatise on the workings of Oceania being banished all together for being too revealing - again - unironically. (Same twisted re-working of Animal Farm by the literal CIA - why did they even bother when someone could have told them that in the FUTURE no one actually "Reads". Don't bother... Now you can buy single animation cells of Napolean and other pigs ... Nothing Fahrenheit 451 about that at all. ).
.
.
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Orwell's actual interjections and even phased intro-jections serve as a better set of guides as to the absurdity of Oceania and its use of resources and human labor that get sunk irretrievably to the bottom of the ocean. Currently the "American way" and beyond. I'm not going to get into how service sector employees get fleeced by a factor twelve to fourteen to pay for defense sector employees getting the same wages or the food insecurity of military personnel. Hair dressers being pick pocketed to pay for bombs that we are forbidden from knowing their whereabouts or their final (applied) destination.
WHY all the recent double talk - double think - and double speak from every outlet and so called "News" "Media" (outlets) and mouth-pieces.
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OBVIOUSLY turn'p [In any rational society] should be put down* like a mentally retarded DOG.
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Orwell really intended that the work 1984 be a warning of primarily a fascist style of totalitarianism.
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BUT - it's Trumpian incompetence that is keeping most of us alive and thankfully as yet (as had been speculated about for a long time ) what happens when you have a mentally competent right wing / "Dictate" that understands the Constitution - inside and out and knows where ALL the little holes and failures against decency lie.
* I know this as my father who was raised in Germany 1930 onwards used to say "Back in MY day we used to know what to do with such people " referring to my mentally retarded uncle (on my mother's side) who came to live with us after his mother (in North Carolina) - my Grandmother died.
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I have no compunctions about that as Trump himself thinks that way. If Trump himself was a political opponent to and against another version of himself he would be DEMANDING that the "other" identical Trump be put down or at least castrated (so "it" can't breed.).
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BUT we in a so called civilized or barely civilized society "Don't do that" - "Morality" being "Good manners" after all.
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Personally I am in the bubble and I am NOT actually able to fully assert that trump is in fact President of the United States.
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^^^ As I am immersed wittingly and unwittingly in a protracted literal Orwellian experiment.
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You can't outrun the bubble - or at least I can't due to personal circumstances.
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turn'p as the ultimate wrecking ball has NOT quite proven his worth to the destruction of the two headed garbage monster - "Our" legislature.
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Need to give the man a bit more room to take a really GOOD swing at things not just as a -
^^^ 1987 premier ... YES it is very surreal in a way and the obvious dearth of actual Chinese performers.
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The MUSIC speaks volumes and speaks for itself but I DO recommend that you read ALL of the libretto before hand.
[Ok so they selected three arias / passages from the aforementioned "gig" / concert. ].
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The lighting, mood, actual music choreography and design (and obviously libretto) has a very clear intent.
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Please WAKE UP... (I'm not a fan of harvesting organs from the genetically fingerprinted Falon Gong either but MANY of "us" seem totally happy with our slave labored i-phones - probably made in Xiang province whose Apple profits go to bail out the State of Kentucky <--- You want to turn that into an Opera ? ).
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My bone of contention is that the Chinese have the best production systems on the planet bought from Switzerland, Germany, Japan and Italy and by and through Taiwan and American capability on home turf has been allowed to rot, or all be lock stock and barrel moved to China - legendary companies - beyond Pratt and Witney and Curtis Wright, suc companies like Hardinge, Bridgeport - and Moore (of foundations of accuracy and jig grinding fame) now barely re-badged imports through Taiwan. Less than a memory and now nearly practically useless.
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The point is China has WAY more robots than we do and it's not a case of "Slave labor" and the loss of teenage girl's fingers or the need to put nets up to stop employees becoming street pizza while living in cages / dormitories anymore is what's actually kicking our asses. <--- THAT would be another opera. THEY China and wiping the floor with what's left of the "Knowing why" (Physics for example) - the "Knowing how" - like actual engineering in material terms and the "ability to do" - i.e. the actual knowledge and tribal knowledge and American Capabilities that then became the "Rust belt".
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The United States are rapidly becoming the Do'tards of the entire planet and ONLY now a shop window to 330 million consumers / magots.
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America's capability has been reduced to retarded movies and not very effective or 'Saleable" weapons systems - i.e. the Germans and the Japanese are NOW allowed to make fully fledged weapons platforms in number - scale and might. It's not like the Germans and the Japanese aren't good at making stuff YKWIM ? US tanks and their respective ecosystems already proven to be completely useless for "European" applications / theatre of war / defense.
What was actually written in the program notes (offered below): I DEFY anyone to write something better... You are writers allegedly, not cheap (political) hacks... (cough cough) - no really.
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To be able to summarize and explain one of the greatest operas and it's synthesis and origins AND content and development and ... and ... and...
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Having been married to a professional editor (twenty years) and frankly excellent writer I defy ANYONE to do better in the following treatment. Once again the banality of those that choose to simplify to the point of lying. YES editorial zeal is one thing but twisted confabulation clumsily shoe-horned - another.
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Do better ! (If you can - If you can't then dowwwwn't worrrry aboudit...). 'cuz I know you won't anyway.
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It's like some people have no ears to hear nor soul (as such to hear with) <--- Which is fine... not everybody actually understands music.
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It's OK...
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"
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JOHN ADAMS
Three Scenes from Nixon in China
Since John Adams’s Nixon in China was premiered by Houston Grand Opera in October 1987, it has become one of the most celebrated works of modern music. The composer’s first opera, the piece was the foundation for a revitalization of American opera and music drama over the past four decades. Adams himself contributed many of the most enduring works in that renaissance, including The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic, Girls of the Golden West, and most recently Antony and Cleopatra. Beyond the theater, Adams has excelled in orchestral music, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his On the Transmigration of Souls and the Grawemeyer Award for his Violin Concerto. He has written piano concertos for Emanuel Ax, Yuja Wang, and Víkingur Ólafsson, and has been particularly associated with the San Francisco Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic. An advocate for younger composers, he is also active as a conductor.
Composed between 1985 and 1987, Nixon in China grew out of a suggestion from the director Peter Sellars, who, along with librettist Alice Goodman, collaborated with Adams on most of his stage works. Adams has also worked frequently with Nixon in China choreographer Mark Morris. The plot of Nixon in China is based on historic events that took place just 15 years before the opera’s premiere. Along with The Death of Klinghoffer—a 1991 dramatization of the 1985 hijacking of the ship Achille Lauro and the killing of one of its passengers—the opera helped create the subgenre of the “headline opera,” works that refract the mythology of recent real-life events and personalities through the lens of operatic music, words, and staging.
By the 1980s, when Nixon in China was conceived, both former US President Richard Nixon (1913–1994) and late Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976) were nearly universally maligned figures. Even apart from Western antipathy for Maoist communism, it was widely recognized that Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) had been a reactionary and massively destructive enterprise. Nixon had resigned in disgrace from his presidency on August 9, 1974, due to the Watergate scandal involving illegal attempts to investigate and discredit the Democratic party. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 started the process of ending decades of Chinese political and commercial isolation from the West, with an important parallel goal of further isolating the Soviet Bloc. Nixon, a staunch anti-Communist, took a huge political risk with his overtures to Mao.
Adams and his creative partners, realizing the significance of Nixon’s visit, took an approach that avoids satire and latter-day political critique in spite of their inherent antipathy to Nixon and his politics. With only Henry Kissinger’s role as a possible exception, the opera depicts its six principal characters as fully human and multidimensional to the degree possible within the medium. The libretto takes us from the showy but tentative and awkward public scenes of Richard and Pat Nixon’s arrival in Beijing through attempts at personal understanding between the opposing parties. Parallels are created between the husband-and-wife pairs Mao / Chiang Ch’ing and Nixon / Pat Nixon and between the two central diplomats, Chou En-lai and Henry Kissinger. Several of the opera’s scenes imagine the characters in personal and private moments, contrasting starkly with the well-documented pomp and theatrical inanity of the public scenes. These private moments, and moments originating in the characters’ own minds and memories, are opportunities for poetic introspection.
The first of the Three Scenes from Nixon in China is the entirety of Act I, Scene 1—an unbroken, frenetic, and intensely energetic 20-minute span that opens with representatives of China’s armed forces singing Mao’s Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention. A fanfare-laced orchestral episode announces the arrival of the Nixons on the Spirit of 76. They are met ceremoniously by Premier Chou En-Lai. As Chou introduces the Nixons to other dignitaries, Nixon (“News! News! News!”) contemplates the historic gravity of the occasion, moving from optimism to despair.
During Nixon’s diplomatic meetings, Chinese officials toured Pat Nixon to Beijing’s historic and culturally important sites. In Act II, Scene 1,
pausing under the Gate of Benevolence and Longevity at Beijing’s Summer Palace, she sings in the aria “This is prophetic!” of her vision of a utopian future strikingly similar to an illusory past. The final movement of the suite is taken from the closing scene of Act I, during the state banquet honoring the Nixons on their first evening in Beijing. Nixon’s speech follows Premier Chou’s toast to the visitors and to the prospect of understanding. Nixon toasts, noting that technology is taking their words into space and around the world and hoping that the two nations might move together toward a common goal over the ensuing days. The soloists compete with the chorus’s cries of “cheers.”
—Robert Kirzinger
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"
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^^^ If in the future that I have an extremely complex and thorny and challenging work that needs to be explained I could do a hell of lot worse than seek out Robert Kirzinger.
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You know ACTUALLY READ what he wrote rather than cherry pick slanted comments.
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Thanks for posting the link; you were very lucky if you were able to attend that concert.
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Not everybody has such ability or FREEDOM to travel <--- take note.
Thanks for being a constant voice for freedom everywhere. Where we are on the right side of history in the Middle East, we are falling short almost everywhere else. Inconstant, transactional, cynical and, sadly, complacent, we are insufficiently passionate about the freedom of others.
In a just political world “My friend Xi” and Don King Trump would be sharing a cell in…Forgive me Jesus, Western Civilization is hanging by the skin of our teeth. The President of the United States pals around with the worlds biggest terrorists. Earths biggest mass murderer still has a skyscraper size mural in the Forbidden City and the U.S. Justice Department has banner with a two bit mobster’s grinning mug…and so many of my fellow Americans could give a ….anymore than Han supremacists murdering and imprisoning good peoples yearning to breathe free from dick tator ship. God bless you Jay for not stepping on your moral compass like so many have because they like The Dons policies and have forsaken all good things Republican. If only we the people had a loyal opposition party with the strength and intelligence of Chinese people you celebrate…whose names and faces I admit I will not remember because I cannot do anything to help them. God HELP U.S. Please take Heat Miser away and give Chinese dissidents some hope. Gotta run on. Peace through superior mental firepower
"Adams and his creative partners, realizing the significance of Nixon’s visit, took an approach . . ."
I think this really should have read, "Amy Goodman and her creative partners . . ." Goodman was responsible for the remarkably nuanced libretto, and her concern was not to exclude but to focus on what Nixon and Pat Nixon, Mao and Jiang Qing, Kissinger and Zhou Enlai thought of Mao's politics, and of themselves. The opera performed has always seemed to me like an interesting thought experiment, and although I've never been drawn to dissonant, minimalist music, Adams designed it to serve brilliantly.
I think there is dissonance of another sort in the way Americans celebrate dissidence in China. When China's first modern revolution occurred in 1911/12, its chief architect, Sun Yat-sen included "minquan" (civil rights; democratic rights) as one of its three basic planks, but advocated that the revolutionary government implement it slowly, during a period of "tutelage." The idea of "minquan" was so alien to Chinese political and social culture that it would take perhaps a generation before people understood its meaning deeply enough to value and sustain a government based on such a pillar. Chaotic political events over the years between the first revolution and the 1949 Communist Revolution did not really allow for the "tutelage" Sun envisioned, and while there may be plenty of dissatisfaction with government policies and the ineffectiveness and corruption of the Communist state, the PRC political heroes we tend to celebrate, such as Liu Xiaobo, may not represent the political vision of most people in the PRC. The late Cultural Revolution period of Maoism, which is where "Nixon in China" is set, was a particularly insane devolution of Chinese communism, one that Deng Xiaoping and his associates worked hard to dig out of. The authoritarianism of the Xi Jinping era is (to my mind) a very bad version of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" (or capitalism with Chinese characteristics, for that matter), but if there were suddenly truly free elections in China with full-fledged and well funded Western liberal candidates, I suspect the elected government in most regions would resemble the current "elected" government of the Xi regime.
Liu Xiaobo. Li Qiaochu. Yaqui Wang. Shining examples to look up to while we fight to regain our democracy. Will we meet the challenges and sacrifices as they have?
Cheeto’s Corruption Of Conservatism
The always brilliant Thom Hartmann over at Raw Story(https://bit.ly/3OBrVZm) writes a distillation piece on today’s “conservative” movement aka the CNPP(Conservative Nazi Pedo Party) explaining its evolution since Eisenhower in the 1950’s to today’s dysmorphic conservatism that supports inequality based on a financial platform where government works only for the wealthy
This type of “I’ve got mine, screw you” political attitude currently has permeated all 3 levels of government and is far from what the conservative movement in the 1950’s meant which was to not radically or rapidly change society without first thinking through the consequences in detail, and then, when you do decide to make changes to the rules of society, you move forward in measured increments. Conservatively
Over decades of policies to ravage the principle that all men/women are created equal and aided by the likes of the John Birch Society, Reagan’s demand to cut social safety net programs, and Clarence Thomas’ corruption of SCOTUS, today’s conservative movement has become a fascist haven for the plutocratic wealthy class(Musk, Theil, Karp) willing to strike any corrupt deal that furthers their ends(Cheeto, Jared, Don Jr)
WE the People have slowly unconsciously witnessed the wealthy take over our country and turn it into a quagmire of corruption and graft It’s time to wake up and demand a equality and restore accountability
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL96d80DJRI&t=1s
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^^^ Bernstein's 'MASS' 1981 at the Kennedy Center (for cultural blah blah TK)
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I wonder if some of RDI's retinue were in attendance then and there.
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Sponsored by Shell Oil Company ...
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Maybe not so heavily by Raytheon etc.
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We are sooooo screwed.
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Works focusing on the preservation of nature and all it's biomes are gonna find very little Big corporate funding.
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Or at least not seem ludicrously hypocritical and moronic to an extreme degree, but as I see it these companies are not so in love with OIL either but (as previously stated) are in the Energy business and moreover the MONEY business.
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As previously stated these energy entities and oil companies historically have hedged their bets with copious alternate energy research.
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Seems their direction needs to be similarly bought - but right now it seems that beyond the straight of Oman is governed by insurance underwriters.
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As an underwriter you CAN indeed end up on the end of rope from a beam or ceiling fixture.
.
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Even in art - "fairness".
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Even if the subject matter is very dark.
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https://www.bso.org/profiles/robert-kirzinger
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Take note ^^^ Literally,
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One would think that these guys here would be all over this...
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https://www.bso.org/events/the-testament-of-ann-lee-in-70mm-e-pluribus-unum-from-many-one?performance=2026-01-16-18%3A00
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E Pluribus Unum is 70mm FFS...
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Tanglewood IS a BIG DEAL... (Many luminaries of our time having spent TIME there - not least for my money Benjamin Britten - TBH not such a great fan of the War Requiem - for ME. ).
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Jeez - what are you like ?
./\\
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Blah blah blah - twisted rhetoric.
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You see the Americans never envisioned a totalitarian communist - capitalist country...
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They / We (not me) but 'We" Americans thought that with enough Coca-Cola and Mc Donalds and BAD Hollywood movies and really GREAT Buicks that they'd totally throw in the towel of 'Communist" control.
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We're talking about CHINA here - not America !!!
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Goodness...
.
Up until the modern era South Korea was the model and success story of how to bring capitalism to the Far East / South East Asia a "Proven" model that could work (theoretically) again and again and agian.
.
Seems in hindsight through various home grown corrupt and powerful families in South Korea that near Wester Style Capitalism was able to take root. ANNNNND eventually some sort of version or flavor of "Democracy / Democracon like we have here back in the ole' US of A.
.
.
Turns out S. Korea was the EXCEPTION <--- ( All caps but not yelling - just emphasis as I have no other formatting tools available to me here in Substack this way ), and China still has a really long memory for the Opium Wars (turns out it wasn't " Just" the British that were in on that and various and massive crimes perpetrated by the Japanese of very recent history (by comparison).
.
I DO have a lot of faith in China and Chinese youth in particular but actual change is going to be very very very slow. At some point I believe that Chinese youth ultimately will be the one's that drag the rest of the countries that divide this planet into some sort of "Environmental" compliance EVEN the Americans.
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Not in my lifetime (what's left of it and I'm not actually THAT old).
.
Taiwan being the lynchpin really holds all of this (Sh*t) togther.
.
SEEMINGLY this week in particular nearly ALL and sundry seem to be engaging in some sort of 1984 (Orwell) styled double speak and double talk and double think.
.
The Emanual Goldstein passages being of the format of Righteous UP - UP - UP - UP themed rhetoric - word salad - word salad - (Inverted ) Down - Down - Down - Down rhetoric...
.
Left - left - left - left
.
Word salad,
.
Word salad,
.
(Counter positioned BUT crucially not counter posed)
.
Right - Right - Right - Right - Right...
.
.
Word -salad,
.
LEFT - LEFT - LEFT - LEFT...
.
Each contiguous block of like purposed prose being completely rational and fully operable to itself - coherent.
.
THE SKILL of double talk and double think and double speak is the ART of the word - salad... The all important connecting layer and piece of stratigraphy that layer by layer glues this grizzly cake together...
.
^^^ We've been seeing a LOT of that this week.
.
Generally when people read 1984 (See Eric this is how they will erode you to read and perform Animal Farm that you hate so much.),
.
"They" take the Emanual Goldstein passages WAAAAY too literally and try to decode their actual essence as being the terrifying codes of communist totalitarian entities.
.
[I have written much about that in the past but obviously the work (1984) was essentially co-opted by Western propaganda offices to serve as a tool to inspire fear of Communist totalitarian systems re-cast and edited and re-framed for Cold-War purposes.
.
^^^ The literal and actual THING that Eric Blair / George Orwell was specifically warning against - that his work (unironically) would be co-opted and trans-muted into the near-literal opposite article and message. And of course, ALL of the wit and clever sarcasm scrubbed out and Orwell's treatise on the workings of Oceania being banished all together for being too revealing - again - unironically. (Same twisted re-working of Animal Farm by the literal CIA - why did they even bother when someone could have told them that in the FUTURE no one actually "Reads". Don't bother... Now you can buy single animation cells of Napolean and other pigs ... Nothing Fahrenheit 451 about that at all. ).
.
.
.
Orwell's actual interjections and even phased intro-jections serve as a better set of guides as to the absurdity of Oceania and its use of resources and human labor that get sunk irretrievably to the bottom of the ocean. Currently the "American way" and beyond. I'm not going to get into how service sector employees get fleeced by a factor twelve to fourteen to pay for defense sector employees getting the same wages or the food insecurity of military personnel. Hair dressers being pick pocketed to pay for bombs that we are forbidden from knowing their whereabouts or their final (applied) destination.
.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_geography_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Four
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WHY all the recent double talk - double think - and double speak from every outlet and so called "News" "Media" (outlets) and mouth-pieces.
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OBVIOUSLY turn'p [In any rational society] should be put down* like a mentally retarded DOG.
.
Orwell really intended that the work 1984 be a warning of primarily a fascist style of totalitarianism.
.
BUT - it's Trumpian incompetence that is keeping most of us alive and thankfully as yet (as had been speculated about for a long time ) what happens when you have a mentally competent right wing / "Dictate" that understands the Constitution - inside and out and knows where ALL the little holes and failures against decency lie.
.
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___________________________________________________________________________
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* I know this as my father who was raised in Germany 1930 onwards used to say "Back in MY day we used to know what to do with such people " referring to my mentally retarded uncle (on my mother's side) who came to live with us after his mother (in North Carolina) - my Grandmother died.
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I have no compunctions about that as Trump himself thinks that way. If Trump himself was a political opponent to and against another version of himself he would be DEMANDING that the "other" identical Trump be put down or at least castrated (so "it" can't breed.).
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BUT we in a so called civilized or barely civilized society "Don't do that" - "Morality" being "Good manners" after all.
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Personally I am in the bubble and I am NOT actually able to fully assert that trump is in fact President of the United States.
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^^^ As I am immersed wittingly and unwittingly in a protracted literal Orwellian experiment.
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You can't outrun the bubble - or at least I can't due to personal circumstances.
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turn'p as the ultimate wrecking ball has NOT quite proven his worth to the destruction of the two headed garbage monster - "Our" legislature.
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Need to give the man a bit more room to take a really GOOD swing at things not just as a -
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wrecking - ball - room ++
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(double plus).
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Of course any budding revolutionary would be seeking to completely destabilize that situation...
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With much chaos comes much "opportunity".
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Vis a vis Taiwan.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKZIzZPLgg&list=RDcqKZIzZPLgg&start_radio=1
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^^^ 1987 premier ... YES it is very surreal in a way and the obvious dearth of actual Chinese performers.
.
The MUSIC speaks volumes and speaks for itself but I DO recommend that you read ALL of the libretto before hand.
[Ok so they selected three arias / passages from the aforementioned "gig" / concert. ].
.
The lighting, mood, actual music choreography and design (and obviously libretto) has a very clear intent.
.
Please WAKE UP... (I'm not a fan of harvesting organs from the genetically fingerprinted Falon Gong either but MANY of "us" seem totally happy with our slave labored i-phones - probably made in Xiang province whose Apple profits go to bail out the State of Kentucky <--- You want to turn that into an Opera ? ).
.
My bone of contention is that the Chinese have the best production systems on the planet bought from Switzerland, Germany, Japan and Italy and by and through Taiwan and American capability on home turf has been allowed to rot, or all be lock stock and barrel moved to China - legendary companies - beyond Pratt and Witney and Curtis Wright, suc companies like Hardinge, Bridgeport - and Moore (of foundations of accuracy and jig grinding fame) now barely re-badged imports through Taiwan. Less than a memory and now nearly practically useless.
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The point is China has WAY more robots than we do and it's not a case of "Slave labor" and the loss of teenage girl's fingers or the need to put nets up to stop employees becoming street pizza while living in cages / dormitories anymore is what's actually kicking our asses. <--- THAT would be another opera. THEY China and wiping the floor with what's left of the "Knowing why" (Physics for example) - the "Knowing how" - like actual engineering in material terms and the "ability to do" - i.e. the actual knowledge and tribal knowledge and American Capabilities that then became the "Rust belt".
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The United States are rapidly becoming the Do'tards of the entire planet and ONLY now a shop window to 330 million consumers / magots.
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America's capability has been reduced to retarded movies and not very effective or 'Saleable" weapons systems - i.e. the Germans and the Japanese are NOW allowed to make fully fledged weapons platforms in number - scale and might. It's not like the Germans and the Japanese aren't good at making stuff YKWIM ? US tanks and their respective ecosystems already proven to be completely useless for "European" applications / theatre of war / defense.
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Anyway here's the libretto - READ it first...
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One mo.
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https://www.opera-arias.com/adams/nixon-in-china/libretto/
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^^^ Libretto BUT how that is interweaved is the real ART.
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What was actually written in the program notes (offered below): I DEFY anyone to write something better... You are writers allegedly, not cheap (political) hacks... (cough cough) - no really.
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To be able to summarize and explain one of the greatest operas and it's synthesis and origins AND content and development and ... and ... and...
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Having been married to a professional editor (twenty years) and frankly excellent writer I defy ANYONE to do better in the following treatment. Once again the banality of those that choose to simplify to the point of lying. YES editorial zeal is one thing but twisted confabulation clumsily shoe-horned - another.
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Do better ! (If you can - If you can't then dowwwwn't worrrry aboudit...). 'cuz I know you won't anyway.
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It's like some people have no ears to hear nor soul (as such to hear with) <--- Which is fine... not everybody actually understands music.
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It's OK...
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"
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JOHN ADAMS
Three Scenes from Nixon in China
Since John Adams’s Nixon in China was premiered by Houston Grand Opera in October 1987, it has become one of the most celebrated works of modern music. The composer’s first opera, the piece was the foundation for a revitalization of American opera and music drama over the past four decades. Adams himself contributed many of the most enduring works in that renaissance, including The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic, Girls of the Golden West, and most recently Antony and Cleopatra. Beyond the theater, Adams has excelled in orchestral music, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his On the Transmigration of Souls and the Grawemeyer Award for his Violin Concerto. He has written piano concertos for Emanuel Ax, Yuja Wang, and Víkingur Ólafsson, and has been particularly associated with the San Francisco Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic. An advocate for younger composers, he is also active as a conductor.
Composed between 1985 and 1987, Nixon in China grew out of a suggestion from the director Peter Sellars, who, along with librettist Alice Goodman, collaborated with Adams on most of his stage works. Adams has also worked frequently with Nixon in China choreographer Mark Morris. The plot of Nixon in China is based on historic events that took place just 15 years before the opera’s premiere. Along with The Death of Klinghoffer—a 1991 dramatization of the 1985 hijacking of the ship Achille Lauro and the killing of one of its passengers—the opera helped create the subgenre of the “headline opera,” works that refract the mythology of recent real-life events and personalities through the lens of operatic music, words, and staging.
By the 1980s, when Nixon in China was conceived, both former US President Richard Nixon (1913–1994) and late Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976) were nearly universally maligned figures. Even apart from Western antipathy for Maoist communism, it was widely recognized that Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) had been a reactionary and massively destructive enterprise. Nixon had resigned in disgrace from his presidency on August 9, 1974, due to the Watergate scandal involving illegal attempts to investigate and discredit the Democratic party. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 started the process of ending decades of Chinese political and commercial isolation from the West, with an important parallel goal of further isolating the Soviet Bloc. Nixon, a staunch anti-Communist, took a huge political risk with his overtures to Mao.
Adams and his creative partners, realizing the significance of Nixon’s visit, took an approach that avoids satire and latter-day political critique in spite of their inherent antipathy to Nixon and his politics. With only Henry Kissinger’s role as a possible exception, the opera depicts its six principal characters as fully human and multidimensional to the degree possible within the medium. The libretto takes us from the showy but tentative and awkward public scenes of Richard and Pat Nixon’s arrival in Beijing through attempts at personal understanding between the opposing parties. Parallels are created between the husband-and-wife pairs Mao / Chiang Ch’ing and Nixon / Pat Nixon and between the two central diplomats, Chou En-lai and Henry Kissinger. Several of the opera’s scenes imagine the characters in personal and private moments, contrasting starkly with the well-documented pomp and theatrical inanity of the public scenes. These private moments, and moments originating in the characters’ own minds and memories, are opportunities for poetic introspection.
The first of the Three Scenes from Nixon in China is the entirety of Act I, Scene 1—an unbroken, frenetic, and intensely energetic 20-minute span that opens with representatives of China’s armed forces singing Mao’s Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention. A fanfare-laced orchestral episode announces the arrival of the Nixons on the Spirit of 76. They are met ceremoniously by Premier Chou En-Lai. As Chou introduces the Nixons to other dignitaries, Nixon (“News! News! News!”) contemplates the historic gravity of the occasion, moving from optimism to despair.
During Nixon’s diplomatic meetings, Chinese officials toured Pat Nixon to Beijing’s historic and culturally important sites. In Act II, Scene 1,
pausing under the Gate of Benevolence and Longevity at Beijing’s Summer Palace, she sings in the aria “This is prophetic!” of her vision of a utopian future strikingly similar to an illusory past. The final movement of the suite is taken from the closing scene of Act I, during the state banquet honoring the Nixons on their first evening in Beijing. Nixon’s speech follows Premier Chou’s toast to the visitors and to the prospect of understanding. Nixon toasts, noting that technology is taking their words into space and around the world and hoping that the two nations might move together toward a common goal over the ensuing days. The soloists compete with the chorus’s cries of “cheers.”
—Robert Kirzinger
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^^^ If in the future that I have an extremely complex and thorny and challenging work that needs to be explained I could do a hell of lot worse than seek out Robert Kirzinger.
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You know ACTUALLY READ what he wrote rather than cherry pick slanted comments.
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Thanks for posting the link; you were very lucky if you were able to attend that concert.
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Not everybody has such ability or FREEDOM to travel <--- take note.
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Thanks for being a constant voice for freedom everywhere. Where we are on the right side of history in the Middle East, we are falling short almost everywhere else. Inconstant, transactional, cynical and, sadly, complacent, we are insufficiently passionate about the freedom of others.
In a just political world “My friend Xi” and Don King Trump would be sharing a cell in…Forgive me Jesus, Western Civilization is hanging by the skin of our teeth. The President of the United States pals around with the worlds biggest terrorists. Earths biggest mass murderer still has a skyscraper size mural in the Forbidden City and the U.S. Justice Department has banner with a two bit mobster’s grinning mug…and so many of my fellow Americans could give a ….anymore than Han supremacists murdering and imprisoning good peoples yearning to breathe free from dick tator ship. God bless you Jay for not stepping on your moral compass like so many have because they like The Dons policies and have forsaken all good things Republican. If only we the people had a loyal opposition party with the strength and intelligence of Chinese people you celebrate…whose names and faces I admit I will not remember because I cannot do anything to help them. God HELP U.S. Please take Heat Miser away and give Chinese dissidents some hope. Gotta run on. Peace through superior mental firepower
"Adams and his creative partners, realizing the significance of Nixon’s visit, took an approach . . ."
I think this really should have read, "Amy Goodman and her creative partners . . ." Goodman was responsible for the remarkably nuanced libretto, and her concern was not to exclude but to focus on what Nixon and Pat Nixon, Mao and Jiang Qing, Kissinger and Zhou Enlai thought of Mao's politics, and of themselves. The opera performed has always seemed to me like an interesting thought experiment, and although I've never been drawn to dissonant, minimalist music, Adams designed it to serve brilliantly.
I think there is dissonance of another sort in the way Americans celebrate dissidence in China. When China's first modern revolution occurred in 1911/12, its chief architect, Sun Yat-sen included "minquan" (civil rights; democratic rights) as one of its three basic planks, but advocated that the revolutionary government implement it slowly, during a period of "tutelage." The idea of "minquan" was so alien to Chinese political and social culture that it would take perhaps a generation before people understood its meaning deeply enough to value and sustain a government based on such a pillar. Chaotic political events over the years between the first revolution and the 1949 Communist Revolution did not really allow for the "tutelage" Sun envisioned, and while there may be plenty of dissatisfaction with government policies and the ineffectiveness and corruption of the Communist state, the PRC political heroes we tend to celebrate, such as Liu Xiaobo, may not represent the political vision of most people in the PRC. The late Cultural Revolution period of Maoism, which is where "Nixon in China" is set, was a particularly insane devolution of Chinese communism, one that Deng Xiaoping and his associates worked hard to dig out of. The authoritarianism of the Xi Jinping era is (to my mind) a very bad version of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" (or capitalism with Chinese characteristics, for that matter), but if there were suddenly truly free elections in China with full-fledged and well funded Western liberal candidates, I suspect the elected government in most regions would resemble the current "elected" government of the Xi regime.