ByGD
When my daughter was in the first grade, her teacher used this worksheet to teach them story structure. Never mind that I never had a lesson in story structure in any grade. Even studying story as an adult, this is still one of the most efficient ways to diagram a narrative that I’ve seen. I’ve hung onto the worksheet because I think it’s useful.
ByGD
We woke up early on Saturday morning in Bergen. Our entire Norway itinerary had been shaped around getting my daughter to the weekend family art workshops in the Children’s Art Museum at KODE. But first, we had to find breakfast. And in Bergen, that turned out to be harder than we expected, but in the search, we discovered another Bergen treasure, the Farmers’ Market.
ByGD
No, that’s not “metal infected” although I guess you could call it that. I recently enjoyed an Alcest album, then had a hard time figuring out where to put it in on the blog. I realized that I listen to a lot of music that gets lumped with metal, but really isn’t. Sometimes bands start out really heavy and then mellow or become more sophisticated with age. Or a metal musician does a side project in a different genre. Sometimes, there are weird social dynamics that get an artist lots of metal fans, even though their music doesn’t have any of the sonic markers of metal. So here’s a bunch of metal-inflected music that I like.
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How many things that I love can you fit in one picture? A bookstore. Featuring diverse stories (which is another way of saying stories you haven’t heard a thousand times already). And Icelandic wisdom. Throw in a latte and you’ve got my perfect day.
ByGD
One of the most frequent – and most valid – arguments against the contemporary relevance of classical art forms like opera and ballet is their heroine problem. Misogyny is an unfortunate and unavoidable conclusion when the canon is littered with stories whose female characters are subjected to the virgin/whore binary and who usually end up dying for love regardless of in which category they are placed.
But then I watched the Met’s stream of Norma – a bel canto exception filled with strong, complicated women. In that opera, Pollione, the male romantic lead, starts out as one of the most obnoxious men in theater, a real dick. But he repents and redeems himself with an act usually reserved for the soprano – dying for love. His character development is so unusual that it got me thinking about men in opera. Women might get short shrift, but men aren’t portrayed very nicely either. Normalizing their bad behavior is another facet of misogyny, but the fact remains – if you believe the classics, men are just dicks.
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