Don Giovanni is what a lot of people would call a “problematic fave.” On the one hand, Mozart’s music is incredible. On the other hand, the title character is a rapist. I understand if you want to stop reading now. It’s impossible for contemporary viewers to gloss over or ignore Giovanni’s crimes, which are still too often ignored today. But art is supposed to ask questions, and there is a lot to unpack in Don Giovanni, especially in a nuanced production. Fortunately, Seattle Opera’s new film version of the opera faces the contradictions in Don Giovanni head on while also experimenting with format. The result is a complex and intriguing show that keeps you thinking long after you’ve hit the power button.
I listen to so much death metal, especially of the melodic and doomy varieties, but also the technical and the old school. And maybe it makes me a bad metalhead, but sometimes I’m just not interested in phylogeny.
{Cue yet another nonexistent gif: John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank ordering an empty omelette: I don’t want a semantic argument, I just want the protein!}
I just want to share cool death metal that I’ve found. So here it is.
By now everyone knows that Iceland punches above its weight in music creation. They put out so much good music in so many genres, I will probably never run out of Icelandic music to write about. So here is more Icelandic music I like.
For years I claimed that I hated pop music. Then Coldplay put out Yellow and I had to eat my words. Nowadays, my taste in pop music skews heavily indie, and often local. But there is no question that pop is music I like.
It had nothing to do with the plot, but I was fascinated by the warm weather breed pet penguin in Neon Genesis Evangelion. Not that I actually wanted one for myself. Domestication of wild animals for pets is ethically questionable at best, plus birds are messy. But many years after watching Evangelion, I found myself in possession of a penguin for a short time.
I was at a music festival in Iceland. Intending to take a nap before dinner so we’d have energy to stay up for the late bands, we headed back to the tent. But like the three bears, we found a Goldilocks in a penguin suit sound asleep headfirst in my husband’s bag.
We couldn’t just leave him there for fear of him vomiting in our tent. But we couldn’t wake him. So we called on our neighbors for help. With a person on each ankle and one to hold the bag, we extricated the squatter from our tent and roused him to semicoherence.
Giant Penguin
The tall Icelandic youth wearing a penguin suit had drunk too much and gone to sleep it off, but was unable to locate his friends’ tent. Despite teasing about maternal instincts from the neighbors, I felt nervous just sending him on his way. So I walked him back to the festival lost and found.
We chatted along the way. I was impressed that he spoke English so well when he could barely remain upright and was obviously trying to deal with pants that had fallen down inside his suit. But he said, “Yeah, but I couldn’t do higher maths now.”
I told the ladies at the lost and found that I wanted to turn in a lost child. They were a bit bemused, that never having happened before at an 18+ festival, and the penguin took mild offense. He was, after all, more than a foot taller than me.
“Child?” he protested.
“Well, you are wandering around lost in fuzzy pajamas.”
I left him sitting on a chair nearby once the festival volunteers agreed to keep an eye on him until his friends showed up or he remembered where he was camping.
It turned out that he was only off by a couple of tents, so we ran into each other several times that weekend and got to be friends a bit for the duration of the festival. But I won’t share his name or any of the interesting details of his life. After all, he’s probably all grown up by now.
