2/24/2006

You can´t go home again. Unless they have a DVD player.

We are taking five days off and this crappy holiday´s to blame. Assuming I can make it through today (the ships usually berth on Saturdays, which means we must make sure that come tomorrow everything´s kosher) I have until Wednesday morning to do… well, not much.

Turn on your loudspeakers for the lingo:
Carnaval! Caipirinha! Cyanide capsule in the filling of my back teeth and I bite hard, god, I hate this time of the year it´s so much worse than Christmas or New Year´s Eve, it´s one of those days you keep wishing for searing hot Napalm to pour down from the sky above our collective asses.
It´s not about elitism, it´s about really bad music and there´s simply no excuse for listening to bad music.

But I have a plan and it´s fool-proof; it´s going to be big, it´s going to be grand, it´s going to be one those once-in-a-lifetime things, it´s going to be positively (and literally) Wagnerian! We´re fighting fire with fire. The whole “knowing Hemingway” thing kind of fell through partially because the guy just wouldn´t change the setting in For Whom the Bell Tolls (book; never saw more than five minutes of the movie anyway) and the one about the fish was one of those classic cases of too little, too late. The one about the ambulances in WWI was pretty cool, though.
…So we´re switching the experiment to a whole new direction, media too. DVD now. My parents bought a DVD player a few months ago for their place and even though I was a bit reluctant at first about it I quickly discovered the joys of having the complete 1960s episodes of Star Trek at home. Despite being kind of jaded by watching 16 “Legion of Doom” episodes of Superfriends in one weekend the honeymoon still is on between me and the DVD player. But well, yeah, do I digress.
Now, thing with the DVD for the holiday is we´re packing an ungodly amount of Opera DVDs, it´s my own Opera-thon, have been getting into Richard Wagner´s works lately, I´m strictly a beginner with a tsunami behind my ears but hey, we all gotta start somewhere, right?

Get ready for 15 hours straight of Der Ring des Nibelungen, early 1990s NY Metropolitan stage productions of the four operas; Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Gotterdämmerung conducted by that fellow James Levine who looks like Newman the mailman from Seinfeld.

People say it can´t be done. People say it shouldn´t be done. People say one´d rather be out having drunken sex and car crashes (two staples of the holiday).
I´ll tell you this, it can and it will be done. Can´t be so much harder than Superfriends, and the DVDs do have English subtitles.

Off to Asgard, then, though not to that sissy Asgard from the Jack Kirby Marvel Comics. Superman can and will and has whupped Thor the hippie superhero after all.
“In MY world the dials go up to eleven!”