opera, wagner, buffy

This is my friend Arie's wedding cake. She and her mom made it.

Argh. What the hell is up with Firefox? I wrote this huge long post and it just disappeared. Grr.

I saw the posters for next week's production of La Traviata and they're hilarious. They're photos of a white begonia or something, splattered with blood. Are they trying to show what it would look like if Violetta coughed on one?

My father called and told me he saw Carmen last night and was unimpressed by the story. This is inherently my problem with opera. Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti, and Weber (and many, many others) used the most melodramatic bullshit for their libretti. I personally never care about any of the characters. However, I find Wagner to be completely different in this respect. While his characters are gods and heroes and dwarves and giants, somehow he manages to imbue his characters with the full gamut of human emotion and he can break your heart. At the end of Walkure, Wotan has to punish his beloved daughter because she has gone against the fate of the gods and has interfered and meddled with the outcome of human lives. It deeply saddens him to do it, but he must. It sounds silly here, but if you saw it, you would understand.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer also has fully fleshed-out characters with whom one can sympathize to a deeper extent than most shows or movies I've seen.